Imre Kertész - Fatelessness

It looks as though we always carry old habits along with us even to new places; in the hospital, I can tell you, I had to struggle at first with what even I myself found to be many inveterate and ingrained reflexes. Conscientiousness, for instance: to start with, it invariably awakened me at dawn on the dot. At other times I would start awake thinking I had slept through Appell and outside they were already hunting me; only after my racing heart had calmed down would I notice my error and accept what lay before my own eyes, the evidence of reality, that I was where I was, everything was all right, over this way someone was groaning, somewhat farther away people were chatting, and over there someone else had his pointed nose, stony gaze, and gaping mouth trained mutely on the ceiling, that only my wound was hurting, and besides that at most, as at all times, I was very thirsty, presumably due to my fever, quite clearly. In short, I needed a bit of time until I had fully taken it in that there was no Appell , that I would not have to see soldiers, and, above all, did not have to go to work — advantages from which, for me at least, no inconsequential circumstance or illness, at bottom, could detract. From time to time, I too was taken up to a small room on the floor above, where the two doctors worked, a younger and an older one, with my being a patient of the latter, so to say. He was a lean, dark-haired, kindly looking man, in a clean uniform, with proper shoes, an armband, and a normal, recognizable face that put me in mind of an amiable, aging fox. He asked where I was from and recounted that he himself came from Transylvania. In the meantime he had stripped off the peeling and by now caked, greenish yellow wad of paper that had been rolled around the knee area, then, putting his weight behind both arms, squeezed from my thigh all the pus that had accumulated there in the interim, and finally, with some instrument resembling a crochet hook, poked a rolled-up length of gauze between skin and flesh — for purposes of “maintaining an open passage” and “the drainage process,” as he explained, lest the wound heal prematurely. For my part, I was happy to hear this as, when you came right down to it, I had nothing to do on the outside; if I really thought things through, of course, my health was hardly of such pressing concern to me. Another comment he made, though, was less to my liking. He reckoned the single perforation on my knee was not sufficient; in his opinion, a second opening ought to be made on the side and connected with the first by yet a third incision. He asked if I was prepared to brace myself for that, and I was utterly amazed that he was looking at me as if he were actually awaiting an answer, my consent, not to mention authorization. I told him, “Whatever you wish,” and he immediately said that in that case it would be best not to delay. He duly set to on the spot, but then I found myself obliged to act a little bit vocally, which, I could see, got on his nerves. He even commented several times: “I can’t work like this,” for which I tried to make excuses: “I can’t help it.” After making an inch or so of headway, he finally abandoned the attempt, without fully completing what he had planned to do; even so, he seemed tolerably well pleased, noting, “It’s better than nothing,” since now, he reckoned, he would at least be able to expel the pus from me at two sites. Time also went by in the hospital; if I happened not to be sleeping, then I would always be kept busy by hunger, thirst, the pain around the wound, the odd conversation, or the event of a treatment; but even without anything to occupy me, I can say that I got along splendidly merely by bearing this pleasantly tingling thought in mind, this privilege and the unbounded joy it always afforded. I would interrogate each new arrival for news from the camp: which block they were from, did they by any chance know of a guy called Bandi Citrom from Block Fünf , medium height, broken nose, front teeth missing, but no one could recall such a person. Most of the injuries I saw in the surgery room were similar to mine, likewise mainly on the thigh or lower leg, though some were higher up, on the hip, the backside, arm, even the neck and back, being what are known scientifically as “phlegmons,” a term I heard a lot, the presence and particularly high incidence of which was neither odd nor amazing under normal concentration camp conditions, as I learned from the doctors. A little later on, there started to arrive cases who had to have a toe or two amputated, sometimes all of them, and they recounted that it was winter out there in the camp, so their feet, being in wooden shoes, had frozen. On another occasion, some manifestly high-ranking personage, in a tailored prison uniform, entered the bandaging station. I distinctly heard a quiet “ Bonjour! ” from which, along with the letter “F” on his red triangle, I immediately worked out he was French, then from the “O. Arzt” inscribed on his armband that he was clearly the chief medical officer in our hospital. I stared at him for a long time, because it was ages since I had seen anyone so elegant: he was not particularly tall, but his uniform was nicely filled out by appropriate bulges of flesh on the bones, his face similarly padded, every feature unmistakably his own, with expressible emotions, recognizable nuances, a rounded chin with a dimple in the middle, his olive skin gleaming softly in the light that fell on it, the way skin had generally done once, in the old days, among people back home. I assessed him as being not very old, maybe around thirty. I saw that the doctors too perked up a lot, striving to please him, explaining everything, but noticed this was not so much in the way that was customary within the camp as somehow in accordance with the old and, as it were, instantly nostalgic custom back home, with the sort of discrimination, delight, and social graces that one displays when given an opportunity to display how capitally one understands and speaks some cultured language like, as in this instance, French. On the other hand, though, I could not help noting that this cannot have signified much to the chief doctor, for he looked at everything, gave an occasional monosyllabic answer, or just nodded, but taking his time, quietly, gloomily, listlessly, with an immutable expression of some despondent, all but melancholic emotion in his hazel eyes from first to last. I was dumbfounded as I could not work out what might give rise to that in such a well-off, well-heeled Prominent, who had moreover risen to such a high rank. I tried to search his face, follow his gestures, and it only gradually dawned on me that, make no mistake, when it came down to it, even he was obliged to be here, of course; only gradually, and this time not entirely without an element of astonishment, a sort of serene awe, did the impression grow on me, and I reckoned I was on to something, that if I was right, then it must, it seemed, be this situation — in a word, captivity itself — that was troubling him. I would have told him to cheer up, since that was the least of it, but I was afraid that would be temerity on my part, and then it occurred to me that I didn’t speak French anyway.

I slept through the transfer too, more or less. Prior to that, the news had reached me that in the meantime winter quarters, stone-walled barracks, had been constructed in place of the tents at Zeitz, and among those provision for a hospital had not been overlooked. Again I was tossed onto a truck — judging from the darkness, it must have been evening, and from the cold, sometime around midwinter— and the next thing I made out was a cold, well-illuminated anteroom to some immeasurably vast place, and in the anteroom a wooden tub smelling of chemicals. I was obliged to wash — all complaints, pleading, and protest being to absolutely no effect — to dip myself in it to the crown of my head, which, apart from the coldness of its contents, made me shudder even more since I could not help but notice that all the other sick people — wounds and all — had already immersed in that selfsame brown liquid before me. After which, here too time started to elapse, and in essentially the same manner as at the previous place, with only minor differences. In our new hospital, for instance, there were triple-decker bunks; we were also taken off to the doctor less frequently, and so it was more here that my wound cleared up, in its own way, as best it could. On top of that, not long afterward a pain started on my left hip followed by the now familiar flaming red sac. A few days after that, having waited in vain for it to subside, or maybe for something else to intervene, I was driven, like it or not, to mention it to the orderly, then after renewed urging, some further days of waiting, I finally took my place in the queue for the doctors in the anteroom to the barracks, as a result of which, to go with the incision on my right knee, another, roughly the length of my palm, was made on my left hip. More unpleasantness arose from where I was placed, on one of the lower bunks, since it happened to be directly opposite a tiny, unglazed window that was open to the invariably gray sky and on the iron bars of which the clouds of steaming exhalations in here had probably been responsible for forming permanent icicles with a perpetual coating of furry hoarfrost. All I had to wear, however, was what was issued to patients: a short, buttonless shirt and, with some regard to the winter season, the gift of a peculiar, green-colored woolly cap with circular flaps over the ears and a wedge-shaped protrusion over the brow that, although somewhat resembling the headgear of a speed-skating champion or an actor doing Satan on stage, was nonetheless extremely useful. As a result, I was often freezing, especially after losing one of my two blankets, the tatters of which had, up till then, allowed me to make up quite tolerably for the shortcomings of the other: I should lend it for a short period, so said the orderly, he would bring it back later. Even using both hands, my attempts to hold fast to it were in vain, he proving the stronger; but what rather upset me, besides the loss itself, was the thought that, as best I knew, they generally had a habit of stripping the blankets most frequently off those for whom the end seemed predictable, not to say anticipated. On yet another occasion, a voice that had meantime grown familiar to me, from another lower bunk somewhere behind me, alerted me to the fact that an orderly must have made another appearance, once again with a new patient in his arms, and was in the middle of casting around to see which of our beds he might be deposited on. The gravity of the voice’s case, we learned, and the doctor’s approval entitled him to a bed of his own, and he roared and thundered “I protest!” invoked “I have a right to it! Just ask the doctor!” and again “I protest!” so stridently that the orderlies would indeed, eventually, keep carrying their load on to another bed — my own, for example; which is how I acquired another boy who looked to be roughly my own age as a bunk-mate. The sallow face and large, burning eyes seemed vaguely familiar to me, but then, equally, everyone here had a sallow face and large, burning eyes. His first words were to ask if I happened to have a glass of water, so I told him I wouldn’t mind one myself, and that was followed immediately by: what about a cigarette? and of course he was no luckier on that score either. He offered bread for one, but I made it clear he should drop it, that had nothing to do with it, I simply didn’t have any, at which he fell silent for a while. I suspect he must have had a fever as heat was pouring steadily from his persistently shivering body, from which I was able to take agreeable profit. I was less enchanted with all his tossing and turning during the night, which, to be sure, did not always pay adequate consideration to my wounds. I told him as well: Hey! Cut it out, ease up there, and in the end he heeded the advice. I only saw why the next morning, when my repeated attempts to rouse him for coffee were futile. All the same, I hastily passed his mess tin to the orderly along with my own since, just as I was about to report the case, he snappily asked me for it. I later also accepted his bread ration on his behalf, and likewise his soup that evening, and so on for a while, until one day he began to go really strange, which was when I felt obliged finally to say something, as I could not carry on stowing him in my bed, after all. I was somewhat apprehensive as the delay was by now rather obvious, though its reason— with a mite of acumen, on which I could still draw — seemed easy enough to deduce, but anyway he was taken away with the others and nothing was said, thank goodness, so for the time being I too was left without a companion.