Imre Kertész: Fatelessness

They stood there, hanging about, quietly conferring, one leaning over to adjust the pillow, another — as best I could see — possibly attempting to interpret what the patient was saying or a look he was giving, when all of a sudden I saw a glint of yellow, then a knife and, with Pyetchka’s assistance, a metal mug materialized, a crunchy rasping — and even had I not believed my own eyes, my nose was now able to give irrefutable proof that the object I had just seen was, no two ways about it, truly a lemon. The door opened again, and I was utterly dumbfounded to see that this time the doctor hurried in, an occurrence that I had never previously witnessed at that uncustomary time of day. People immediately made way for him; he bent over the patient to examine and palpate something, only briefly, then vanished just as quickly and moreover with an extremely glum, stern, one could say snappish look on his face, without having addressed so much as a single word to anyone, even cast so much as a single look at anyone, indeed somehow rather trying to avoid the glances that were being directed at him — or at least that is how it seemed to me. Before long, I saw the visitors had fallen strangely silent. One or another separated from their midst to go over to the bed and bend down over the patient, after which they started to drift away in their ones and twos, just as they had come. Now, however, they were a bit more despondent, a bit more haggard, a bit more weary, and somehow even I myself felt sorry for them at that moment, because I could not help noticing that it was as if they had finally lost their hope, however irrationally it might have been sustained, or their faith, however secretly it may have been nourished. A while later, Pyetchka very circumspectly set the corpse on his shoulder and took it away somewhere.

Last of all, there was also my own guy, for example. I came across him in the washroom, seeing that, bit by bit, it no longer even occurred to me that I might be able to wash anywhere other than at the water tap over a washbasin in the bathroom at the end of the corridor, and even there not out of any compulsion, merely out of a sense of propriety, as I gradually came to find out; as time went by, indeed, I even noticed that I was almost starting to take exception to the fact that the place was unheated, the water cold, and there was no towel. Here too you could see one of those portable red contraptions resembling an open cupboard, the invariably spotless inner receptacle of which was maintained, changed, and kept clean by some mystery person. On one occasion, just as I was about to leave, a man walked in. He was good-looking, his brushed-back mop of silky black hair slipping back in unruly fashion over his brow on both sides, his complexion having that slightly olive shade sometimes seen with very dark-haired people, and from his being in the prime of manhood, his well-groomed external appearance and his snow-white smock, I would have taken him to be a doctor had the inscription on his armband not informed me he was merely a Pfleger, while the letter “T” in the red triangle told me he was Czech. He halted, seemingly surprised, even a little bit astonished perhaps, at my presence, from the way he looked at my face and the neck poking out from my shirt, my sternum, my legs. He immediately asked me something, and, using a phrase that had stuck with me from the Polish conversations in the ward, I said “ Nye rozumen .” So he inquired in German who I was and where I came from. I told him Ungar, from here, Saal sechs, whereupon, bringing in an index finger to clarify his words, he said “ Du: warten hier. Ik: wek. Ein moment zurück. Verstehen?” [28] Broken German: “You, wait here. Me go. A moment back. Understand?” He went off, then returned, and before I knew it I found that my hand was holding a quarter loaf of bread and a neat little can, the lid already opened and bent back, in which was an untouched filling of pinkish sausage meat. I looked up to thank him, only to see the door already swinging shut behind him. After I had returned to my room and tried to recount this to Pyetchka, describing the man in a few words, he immediately recognized that it must be the Pfleger from the room next door, Saal 7 . He even mentioned the name, which I understood to be Bausch, though on reflection I think it is more likely he said Bohoosh. That, at any rate, is what I heard later from my new neighbor, because in the meantime patients in our room had come and gone. Above me, for instance, having already taken a patient out the very first afternoon I was there, Pyetchka soon brought a new one, a boy of my own age and, as I later found out, also race, though Polish speaking, who was called Kuhalski or Kuharski, as I heard it from Pyetchka and Zbishek, with the stress always on the “harski”; at times they cracked jokes with him, and they must have annoyed him, maybe even pulled his leg, because he was often fuming, at least as far as one could tell from the irritated tone of his voluble chattering and thickening voice and the bits of straw that were sprinkled through the gaps between the wooden cross-boards onto my face by his tossing and turning on these occasions— to the great amusement of all the Polish speakers in the room, as I could see. Somebody also came in place of the Hungarian patient in the bed next to mine, another boy, though at first I had little luck in ascertaining where he was from. He and Pyetchka could make themselves understood, yet to my now steadily more practiced ear he did not sound entirely Polish. He did not respond to my Hungarian, but, what with the carroty hair he was now beginning to sprout, the freckles dotted over a fairly full-fleshed face that suggested a very tolerable manner, the blue eyes that seemed to quickly size up and soon get the measure of everything, I immediately found him a little suspect. While he was making himself comfortable, settling down, I spotted blue marks on the inner surface of his forearm: an Auschwitz numbering, in the millions. It was only one afternoon, when the door burst open and Bohoosh entered to set down on my blanket, as had become his regular practice once or twice a week, his gift — this time too, as usual — of bread and a tin of meat, and without leaving time for even a greeting, and with barely a nod to Pyetchka, before he was already off and away, that it turned out the boy spoke Hungarian, and what’s more at least as well as I do, because he asked straight off: “Who was that?” I told him that, as far as I knew, it was the Pfleger from the next room, Bausch by name, and that was when he corrected me: “Bohoosh, perhaps,” seeing as that was a very common name in Czechoslovakia, he declared, and that was where he himself was from, as it happened. I asked why he had not spoken Hungarian before now, to which he replied that it was because he did not like Hungarians. He was quite right, I had to admit; all things considered, I myself would find it hard to find much reason to like them. He then proposed that we speak Hebrew, but I had to confess I didn’t understand that, so as a result we stayed with Hungarian. He told me his name too: Luiz, or maybe Loyiz, I didn’t quite catch it. But I did note, “Ah! Lajos, in other words,” however, he strongly objected to that, seeing as it is Hungarian whereas he was Czech and insisted on the distinction: Loiz. I asked him how he came to know so many languages, so he then told me that he actually came from Slovakia, but along with the great bulk of his family, relatives, and acquaintances had fled from the Hungarians, or “the Hungarian occupation” as he termed it, and that sparked off a memory of an event back home, long ago, when flags were flown, music played, and a day-long celebration had imparted the jubilation that was felt on Slovakia again being reannexed to Hungary. He had arrived in the concentration camp from a place that, as far as I could make out, was called “Terezin.” He remarked, “You probably know it as Theresienstadt.” I assured him that no, I didn’t know it by either name, not at all, at which he was utterly amazed, though somehow in much the same way as I was used to being amazed at people who had never heard of the Csepel customs post, for example. He then explained: “It’s the ghetto for Prague.” He maintained that, apart from Hungarians and Czechs, and of course Jews and Germans, he was also able to converse with Slovaks, Poles, Ukrainians, and even, at a pinch, Russians. In the end, we got on quite famously; I told him, since he was curious, the story of how I had become acquainted with Bohoosh, then my initial experiences and impressions, what had passed through my mind the very first day in regard to the room, for instance, which he found interesting enough to translate for Pyetchka as well, who laughed uproariously at me; likewise my fright over the Hungarian patient and Pyetchka’s response, which was that it had been expected for days, so it was pure coincidence that his death had come right then; and there were other things too, though I was now finding it irritating that he started every sentence with “ ten matyar ,” or in other words, “this here Hungarian,” before getting down, obviously, to he says such and such; but this turn of phrase, fortunately, somehow seemed to escape Pyetchka’s attention, as far as I could see. I also noticed, though without thinking about it or drawing any inferences from it, how conspicuously often, and always for a prolonged period, he seemed to have things to attend to outside, but it was only when once he returned to the room with bread and a tin of food, obviously stuff that had come from Bohoosh, that I was somewhat surprised — quite unreasonably, no two ways about it, I had to acknowledge. He said that he too had met Bohoosh by chance in the washroom, just like me. He had been addressed just the same way as me, and the rest had happened just as it had with me. The difference was that he had also been able to speak with him, and it had turned out they were from the same country, and that had really delighted Bohoosh, which was natural enough after all, he maintained, and I had to agree that indeed it was. Looking at it rationally, I found all this, on the whole, entirely understandable, clear, and reasonable; I held the same view as he plainly did, at least insofar as it emerged from his final, brief remark: “Don’t be mad at me for taking your guy,” or in other words, from now on he would be getting what up till now I had been getting, and I could watch while he had a bite to eat, just as he had watched me before. I was all the more astonished when scarcely a minute later Bohoosh bustled in through the door, this time heading straight for me. From then on, his visits were meant for both of us. On one occasion he would bring a ration for each of us separately, on another just one in total, depending on what he could manage, I suppose, but in the latter case he never omitted a hand gesture to indicate that it was to be shared fraternally. He was still always in a hurry, wasting no time on words; his face was still always preoccupied, sometimes care-laden, indeed at times almost angry, all but furious, like someone who now had a doubled burden, a twofold obligation to carry on his shoulders but has no other option than to bear it, since it has landed on him; I could only suppose that this was merely because he apparently took pleasure in it; in a certain sense, he needed this, this was his method of dealing with things, if I may formulate it in such terms, because whichever way I looked at it, puzzled over, or pondered it, I was quite unable to hit on any other explanation, particularly in light of the price that could be commanded, and the great demand there was for such scarce commodities. Even so, I think I came to understand these people, at least by and large. In light of all my experiences, piecing together the entire chain, yes, there could be no doubt, I knew it all too well myself, even if it was in a different form: in the final analysis, this too was just the selfsame factor, stubbornness, albeit, I had to admit, a certain highly refined and, in my experience, so far the most fruitful and, above all, make no mistake, for me the most useful form of stubbornness, there was no disputing that.