Imre Kertész - Fatelessness

I must admit, there are certain things I would never be able to explain, not precisely, not if I were to consider them from the angle of my own expectations, of rule, or reason— from the angle of life, in sum, the order of things, at least insofar as I am acquainted with it. Thus, when they off-loaded me from the handcart onto the ground again, I was quite unable to grasp what I might still have to do with, for instance, hair-clippers and razors. The jammed space, looking at first glance uncannily like a shower room, with its slippery wooden laths onto which I too was deposited amid countless trampling, pressing soles, ankles, ulcerated shanks, and shins — that, by and large, conformed more to my rough expectations. It even fleetingly crossed my mind that, amazing! it seems the Auschwitz custom must be in force here as well. My surprise was all the greater when, after a short wait and a series of hissing, bubbling sounds, water, a copious jet of unexpected hot water, started to gush from the nozzles up above. I was not too pleased, however, because I would have gladly warmed up a little more, but there was nothing I could do about it when, all at once, an irresistible force whisked me up into the air, out of the jostling forest of legs, and meanwhile some kind of big bedsheet and on top of that a blanket were wrapped around me. Then I recollect a shoulder and being draped over it, head to the rear, feet forward; a door, the steep steps of a narrow staircase, another door, then an indoor space, a chamber, a room so to say, where my incredulous eyes were struck, over and above the spaciousness and light, by the well-nigh barrack-room luxury of the furnishings; and finally the bed — manifestly a genuine, regular, single-berth bed, with a well-stuffed straw mattress and even two gray blankets — onto which I rolled from the shoulder. In addition, two men, regular, handsome men, with faces and hair, in white cotton pants and undershirts, clogs on their feet; I gazed, marveled admiringly at them, while they scrutinized me. Only then did I notice their mouths and that some singsong had been humming in my ears for quite some time. I had a feeling they wished to get something out of me, but all I could do was shake my head that, no, I didn’t understand. On that, I heard coming from one of them, but with a most peculiar German accent, “ Hast du Durchmarsch? ” or in other words, did I have the runs, and somewhat to my surprise I heard my own voice give the answer, hard to know why, “ Nein ”—I suppose as ever, even now, again no doubt merely out of pride. Then, after a brief consultation and some hunting around, they pushed two objects into my hands. One was a bowl of warm coffee, the other a hunk of bread, roughly one-sixth of a loaf, I estimated. I was allowed to take them and consume them without payment or barter. For a while after that, my insides, suddenly giving signs of life by starting to seethe and become unruly, occupied all my attention and, above all, my efforts, lest the pledge I had given shortly before should in some way be found to have been untrue. I later woke to see that one of the men was there again, this time in boots, a splendid dark blue cap, and a prison jacket with a red triangle.

So then it was up over the shoulder again and down the stairs, this time straight out into the open air. We soon stepped into a roomy, gray timber barracks block, a sort of infirmary or Revier, if I was not mistaken. There’s no denying, I again found everything here, on the whole, to be roughly in line with what I had readied myself for, ultimately completely in order, not to say homely, only now I could not quite fathom the earlier treatment, the coffee and bread. En route, down the entire length of the barracks, I was greeted by the familiar triple tier of box bunks. Each was jam-packed, and a somewhat practiced eye of the kind that I too could lay claim to immediately recognized, on the basis of the indistinguishable tangle of onetime faces, skin surfaces with their blossoming scabies and sores, bones, rags, and scrawny limbs in them, that these must represent at least five and, in one or another, even six bodies per section. Apart from that, I vainly sought for a glimpse on the bare boards of the straw that had done duty as bedding even in Zeitz — but then, true, I had to admit, that was hardly a particularly important detail in view of the brief time that I obviously had to look forward to being there. Then a fresh surprise as we came to a halt, and words, some sort of negotiation — evidently between the man carrying me and someone else — struck my ear. To begin with, I did not know if I could believe my own eyes (but then I couldn’t be mistaken, because the barracks were extremely well lit with strong lamps). Over on the left I could see two rows of regular boxes there too, except the planks were covered by a layer of red, pink, green, and mauve quilts, above which was another row of similar quilts, and between the two layers were poking, tightly packed together, the bald-cropped heads of children, some smaller, some larger, but mostly those of boys of about my own age. No sooner had I spotted all that than they deposited me on the floor, with someone propping me up so that I wouldn’t slump over, took the blanket from me, hurriedly bandaged my knee and hip with paper, pulled a shirt on me, and then I was slipping between a row of quilting, above and below, on the middle tier, with a boy on either side hastily making room for me.

Then they left me there, again without any explanations, so I was once more thrown back on my own wits. At all events, I had to acknowledge that there I was, and this fact undeniably kept renewing itself every second (again), continuing to sustain me anew. Later on I also became aware of a number of necessary particulars. Where I was, for example, was most likely the front, rather than back, of the barracks, as indicated by a door opposite that opened to the outside, as well as by the airiness of the well-lighted space that was to be seen in front of me — an area in which dignitaries, clerks, and doctors moved and worked, and which was even furnished, at its most conspicuous spot, with a sort of table covered with a white sheet. Those who had their shelter in the timber boxes behind mostly had dysentery or typhus, or if they did not have it, then at least they soon would in all certainty. The first symptom, as the unrelieved stench itself indicated, was Durchfall , or Durchmarsch by its other designation, as the men of the bathhouse Kommando had immediately inquired about, and according to which, I realized, my own place would in fact also have been back there, if I had told the truth. I found the daily food allowances and cuisine too, on the whole, similar to those at Zeitz: coffee at dawn, the soup arriving already early in the morning, one-third or one-quarter of a loaf for the bread ration, though if it was one-quarter then usually with a Zulage. The time of day, due to the constantly uniform lighting, unaltered in any way by the window’s lightness or darkness, was more difficult to keep track of, being deducible solely from certain unequivocal signs — morning, from the coffee, the time to sleep, from the doctor’s farewell every evening. I made his acquaintance on the very first evening. I became aware of a man who had stopped right in front of our box. He could not have been all that tall as his head was roughly on the same level as mine. His cheeks were not just rounded but positively plump, even flabby here and there in their abundance, and he not only had a moustache that was twirled in a circle and almost entirely grizzled, but also, to my great amazement— because in my time in concentration camps I had not previously encountered its like — similarly dove gray, a very carefully trimmed beard, a small one in the shape of a dapper spike on his chin. To go with that, he was wearing a large, dignified cap, trousers of dark cloth, but a prison jacket, albeit of good material, with an armband on which was a red flash bearing the letter “F.” He inspected me in the way that is customary with newcomers, and even spoke to me. I responded with the only sentence of French that I know: “ Dje ne kompran pa, mussiew .” “ Ooee, Ooeee ,” he said, in an expansive, friendly, slightly hoarse voice, “ bon, bon, mo’ fees ,” at which he placed a sugar lump before my nose on the coverlet, a real one, exactly the same as the kind I still remembered from home. He then made the round of all the other boys in both boxes, on all three tiers, with a single lump of sugar being dispensed from his pocket to each of them as well. With some he did no more than just place it in front of them, but with others he took longer, indeed a few were able to speak and he made a particular point of patting them on the cheek, tickling their neck, chattering and jabbering with them a bit the way someone chirrups to his favorite canaries at their regular hour. I also noticed that some favored boys, mainly those who spoke his language, also received an extra sugar lump. Only then did something that had always been preached back at home fall into place, and that was how useful an education can be, most particularly a knowledge of foreign tongues.