Imre Kertész - Fatelessness

But at that very moment the Pfleger came in again, making a beeline for him. He folded up the coverlet, wrapped him in his blanket, and then I could only gape at how easily he shouldered and carried out through the door this, as I could see now, still quite bulky body, with a detached flap of paper bandaging somewhere on the belly waving good-bye as it were. Simultaneously, a brusque click, then an electrical crackling noise was audible. That was followed by a voice announcing: “ Friseure zum Bad, Friseure zum Bad ,” or hairdressers to report to the bathhouse. Slightly rolling its “r’s,” the voice was very pleasant, suave, one could say ingratiatingly silky and melodic, the kind that makes you almost feel it was looking at you, and the first time it almost startled me out of the bed. But then I saw from the patients that this incident aroused about as much excitement as my arrival had done earlier, so I supposed that doubtless it too must obviously be something routine around here. In fact I spotted a brown case that looked like a sort of loudspeaker, above and to the right of the door, and guessed that the soldiers must make a practice of transmitting their orders from somewhere via this gadget. Not much later, the Pfleger returned again, and again went to the bed next to me. He folded the quilt and sheet back, reached through a slit into the palliasse, and from the way that he put the straw in it into order, then the sheet back on top, and finally the quilt as well, I gathered it was not very likely that I would see the previous man again. I could not help myself, then, from reverting to wondering whether it might, perhaps, have been in punishment for blurting out our secret, which might have been picked up and overheard — why not, after all? — via some sort of gadget, an appliance similar to the one up there. However, my attention was again diverted by a voice— this time from a patient over toward the window, three beds away. He was a very emaciated, white-faced young patient, who even had hair on him, thick at that, blonde and wavy. He uttered, or rather groaned, the same word two or three times over, elongating, dragging out the vowels — a name, as I was gradually able to discern: “Pyetchka!… Pyetchka!…” To this the Pfleger said, in an equally drawn-out and, so I sensed, quite cordial tone, just one word: “ Tso? ” After that he also said something at greater length, and Pyetchka — for I had gathered that this must be what they call the Pfleger— went over to his bed. He whispered to him for a good while, somehow the way one does in appealing to someone’s better feelings, urging him to be patient, to hold on just a while longer. As he was doing that, he reached behind the boy’s back to raise him a little, plumped the pillow beneath him, set the eiderdown straight, and this was all done so cordially, with such alacrity, so affectionately — in such a manner, in short, as to utterly confound, all but belie, virtually all the suppositions I had been making. The expression on the face as it again sank back was such that I could only regard it as an expression of calmness, a measure of relief, while the feeble, sighing, and yet still distinctly audible “ Jinkooye… jinkooye bardzo… ” could only be words of thanks, unless I was mistaken. My sober deliberations were upended once and for all by an approaching rumble, then rattle, and, finally, unmistakable clatter that filtered in from the corridor, rousing my entire being, filling it with mounting, ever less suppressible anticipation, and in the end, as it were, obliterating any difference between myself and this state of readiness. Outside there was a clamor, much coming and going, a clopping of wooden soles, and then a gruff voice irritably crying, “ Zaal zecks! Essahola! ” which is to say “ Saal sechs! Essen holen! ” or “Room 6! Get your food!” The Pfleger went out then, assisted by an arm that was all I could see through the crack in the door, lugged in a heavy cauldron, and the room was immediately pervaded by the aroma of soup, and had it been no more than dörrgemüze , merely the familiar nettle soup, I would likewise have been mistaken on that score too.

I was to observe more later on, slowly becoming clear on many other matters as the hours, parts of the day, and eventually whole days passed. At all events, I could not help realizing after a while, however piecemeal, however reluctantly, however cautiously, that, so it seemed, this too was possible, this too was credible, merely more unaccustomed, not to say more pleasant of course, though essentially no odder, if I thought about it, than any of the other oddities that — this being a concentration camp, after all — are very naturally each possible and credible, this way or that. On the other hand, it was precisely this that troubled and disquieted me, somehow undermining my confidence, because after all, if I took a rational view of things, I could see no reason, I was incapable of finding any known and, to me, rationally acceptable cause for why, of all places, I happened to be here instead of somewhere else. Little by little, I discovered that all the patients here were bandaged, unlike in the previous barracks, and so in time I ventured the assumption that over there had been, possibly, a general medical ward, to say no more, whereas this here was perhaps — who knows? — the surgical ward; yet even so, naturally, I could not consider this in itself to be a sufficient reason and appropriate explanation for the work, the enterprise, the veritable coordinated concatenation of arms, shoulders, and considerations that had, in the end — if I seriously cast my mind back — brought me all the way from the handcart to here, this room and this bed. I also attempted to take stock of the patients, get some sense of how things were with them. In general, as best I could tell, most of them must have been older, long-established inmates. I would not have regarded any of them as functionaries, though somehow I would have been equally hesitant to put them in the same category as the prisoners at Zeitz, for example. It also struck me, as time went by, that the chests of the visitors, who popped in to exchange a few words for a minute, always at the same time in the evening, displayed nothing but red triangles; I did not see (not that I missed them in the slightest) a single green or black one, nor for that matter (and this was something more lacking to my eye) a yellow one. In short, by race, language, age, and somehow in other ways beyond that, they were different from myself, or indeed from anyone else, none of whom I had ever had any difficulty understanding up till now, and this bothered me somewhat. On the other hand, I could not help feeling that the explanation was perhaps to be found precisely here, in this. Here was Pyetchka, for instance: every night we fall asleep to his farewell “dobra nots ,” every morning we awake to his greeting of “dobre rano .” The always immaculate order in the room, the mopping of the floor with a wet rag fixed to a handle, the fetching of the coal each day and keeping the heating going, the distribution of rations and the cleaning of mess tins and spoons that went with it, the fetching and carrying of patients when necessary, and who knows how many other things in addition— each and every one of these was his handiwork. He may have wasted few words, but his smile and willingness were unvarying; in short, as if he did not hold what was, after all, the important post of the room’s senior inmate but was merely a person standing primarily at the service of the patients, an orderly or Pfleger, as indeed is inscribed on his armband.

Or take the doctor, for as it has turned out, the raw-faced man is the doctor here, indeed the chief medical officer. His visit, or ward round as I could call it, was always a fixed and invariable ceremony each morning. No sooner had the room been made ready, no sooner had we drunk our coffee and the vessels been whisked off to where Pyetchka stows them, behind a curtain formed from a blanket, than the now familiar footsteps are heard clicking along the corridor. The next minute a vigorous hand throws the door wide open and then, with a greeting of what is presumably “Guten Morgen ,” although all one can pick out is an extended guttural “ Moo’gn ,” in steps the doctor. For some unknown reason, it is not seen as appropriate for us to respond, and evidently he does not expect it either, except maybe from Pyetchka, who welcomes him with his smile, a bared head, and respectful bearing, but, as I was able to observe on many occasions over a long period of time, not so much with that already all-too-familiar respect that one is generally obliged to pay to authorities of higher rank than oneself, but rather as though he were somehow doing no more than simply paying him respect at his own discretion, of his own free will, if I may put it that way. One by one, the doctor picks up from the white table and, with an act of severe concentration, checks through the case-sheets that Pyetchka has set down by his hand — almost as if they had been, say, genuine case-sheets in, say, a genuine hospital where no issue is more cardinal, more self-evident than, say, a patient’s well-being. Then, turning to Pyetchka, he attaches a comment to one or another, or to be more precise, only ever one of two types of comment. He may read “ Kevisch… Was? Kevischtjerz! ” for example, but as I soon learn it would be just as unseemly for one to respond to this, to offer any evidence of one’s presence, as it would be to respond to his good-morning before. “ Der kommt heute raus! ” he may go on to say, by which in every case, as I notice over time, he always means that during the course of the afternoon the patient in question — on his own legs if he is able, or over Pyetchka’s shoulder if not, but one way or the other in any case — must report to him, among the scalpels, scissors, and paper bandages of his surgery, some ten or fifteen yards away from the exit to our corridor. (He, by the way, unlike the doctor at Zeitz, does not seek my permission, and no loud protestations on my part seem to disconcert him in the least as, with an oddly shaped pair of scissors, he snips two new incisions into the flesh of my hip, but from the fact that, after doing that, he expresses the pus from the wounds, lines them with gauze and, as a final touch, smears them, albeit very sparingly, with some sort of ointment, I can only acknowledge his indisputable expertise.) The other observation he may make, “ Der geht heute nach Hause! ” means that he considers the person healed and therefore ready to return nach Hause , or home, or in other words, naturally, to his block within the camp and to work, his Kommando. The next day it all happens exactly the same way, an exact replica of these same orderly arrangements, according to rules in which Pyetchka, we patients, and even the items of equipment themselves seem to participate, fulfill their role, and lend a hand, with uniform gravitas, in the daily recapitulation, enforcement, rehearsal, and, as it were, corroboration of this invariability — in brief, as if there were nothing more natural, nothing more incontestable, than that for him, as doctor, and for us, as patients, our manifest concern and worry, indeed our sole, not to say impatiently awaited aim, is the soonest possible treatment, then speedy recovery and return home.