Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

Franz would have liked to have seen her earlier, one moment before she entered the little fortress of Terezin and changed her clothes, for now she was some other girl. And she wasn’t looking at him. She didn’t look at anyone. No, Isabel, at none of us. Maybe she would have looked at Ulrich. At Ulrich, if he had recognized her. But Ulrich had said “No” as she had just finished saying “Yes.” One night they came to our room, knocked on the door, woke us up, and took Ulrich away, precisely because he had said “No.”

“I went back to Prague to look for her, Isabel.”

“Weren’t they after you?”

“No, they didn’t have time for that. I died, changed my name, came to America. Besides, no one cared about me. I had been a nothing, a nobody. What would have been the point of making an example of me? They neither tried me nor condemned nor absolved me. They didn’t care. And I made my life over again with the same indifference. History never flowed through me, Isabel. I just happened to be around.”

When he finished building the crematorium, a new assignment awaited him. The fortress was now too small for the number of prisoners it contained. A new cell block was needed — immediately, sooner, as soon as possible. He drew up the plans and construction began in October 1943 and continued an entire year. But, Franz, there may be others who are still looking for you. You may still not be safe. I’ll never breathe a word of what you tell me. Don’t try to apologize, make excuses. Just hold me close and tell me about my face and eyes, about Elizabeth’s blood. Be patient and we will be together again. Rub my hair, Franz.

They walk across an open space between buildings. It is eleven at night now. They line up again. The barber, a Greek prisoner, is ready. One by one they undress and get into the five tubs filled with viscous cresyl, while twenty guards look on. Their eyes smart from the disinfectant. They get out and are made to stand against the wall and the barber comes with his scissors and clippers and razor. Their heads shaved, they stand facing the wall. Now they are mechanically holding hands and their eyes are shut so that they will not see each other. The barber sweeps up their fallen hair and gives it to a guard, for everything can be used, nothing is wasted.

“Of course it’s to our credit,” chuckled the Commandant. “It’s a proof of the good order we’ve maintained. It will take care of the accusations that have been made against us. Here we have freedom. Freedom, art, music, eh?”

And during the banquet that followed the ceremony of pinning on the decorations, the Commandant stood and proposed a toast. He said that this day would be engraved in letters of gold in the annals of the Terezin garrison. He was seated beside Eichmann. Eichmann asked quietly about the performance that would conclude the activities of the day.

“The musicians from the Jewish community have prepared a concert,” said the Commandant.

“Good. Do you know the program?”

“Of course. Nothing happens here without my knowing it.”

The construction of the new cell block proceeded at top speed and in one year the building was ready for occupancy, although the roof was not yet finished. Franz had provided five large communal cells on the left, each with a capacity of a hundred and sixty prisoners, each with three basins, two toilets, and a single window. On the right were the eighteen solitary confinement cells. The execution wall behind, like the stage of an amphitheater. It was well, efficiently planned. Soukop was in charge of the Baukommando: hundreds of Jewish prisoners. With them Franz had nothing to do; he merely planned and supervised. A year’s work. He works an entire year and his eyes are those of a man relentlessly searching, seeking, following as he moves through the straight and slanted spaces, undulant yet stable, of that artificial universe, of that spider’s world where the steel webs are the electric fences charged at high tension that she passed through, in the beginning, in the morning on her way to work at the I. G. Farben factory in Monovice; out beneath the stone door above which grass grows as if the fortress were underground, a labyrinth of galleries sunken beneath the brown surface of the earth, and by day he seeks her as he walks the triple corridor of the solitary confinement cells in that world that must mean more than its stone and brick say, that world where she lives and some day has to appear among the bloodless, shaven, emaciated faces that are so strange yet so hauntingly similar to some presentiment or some memory drawn stark in black and white without shading, faces that drink the coal-dark water and the pale vegetable soup and every morning at seven line up before marching off to be freed by labor; he searches for her among the toothless gums that gnaw potatoes and beets, among the naked bodies that lie down at night after removing sweat-drenched, rain-drenched clothing that tomorrow must be worn again, shining brightness, his flashlight in his hand, upon them for any pretext, no pretext, light upon the sleeping faces of the women stretched on the board beds, and again, in daylight, he looks among them as they riot in silence before the only toilet in the cell, a hundred and twenty women and a single basin, and her green eyes have to move, as his own do, hurriedly across the gray buildings and the frost-covered walls that must symbolize something, must be trying to say something, to offer some kind of faith in some kind of order in the midst of this lunatic maze where his eyes stare and seek and search for her before it is too late and the face he remembers is lost forever among the brick walls and the garages and the mud-deep trenches and pits and the make-believe, stagelike backdrops of the dog kennels and the baths of wood and the garbage heaps and the infirmaries and stables, while every day another feature of that face he remembers will be eroding, decaying, disappearing until she will be lost forever in a straw mattress or a wooden tub or the blank negation of a walled-up window; he hears her yell among the women dancing beneath the freezing shower, he searches after her in a world that because it is its own fiction resists all other imagination: all Terezin, the fields, the buildings, the ghetto, is the reply of a free and disembodied imagination to the slavedom of reality: this is not reality but a nightmare or a nightmare representation of reality through which he searches for her, sometimes feverishly, at other times coldly and restrained, among the stained mattresses on the excrement-smeared floors of the infirmary, among the lice in the eyelashes and eyebrows of the men, women, and children dead from typhus who have been thrown into the common pit dug beside the Ohre River where the guards leap in on all fours and with pliers and knives pick out gold-filled teeth before the river filters into the grave and the dead breathe that water which, because they are dead, can no longer infect them with its pestilence. He searches for her in the garrison garden, where a few women work cultivating vegetables; and beyond, to the right, where the morgue stands small and dark on its mound of brown earth. He searches for her among the Czech maids at the Herrenhaus at Christmas when the officers of the garrison stroll between the hedges along the graveled paths carrying their gifts and go inside to exchange toasts with the Commandant and admire the Chinese-lacquered furniture and listen to the latest news on the radio and peer nostalgically at the framed landscape prints and listen to Wagner and set down their glasses of brandy on the glass-top tables. And in the women’s section he lashes his whip against his heel and orders them to look up and give him their names as they paint wooden buttons and sew arch supports for boots and knit soldiers’ socks and clean the rooms and offices: Gertrude Schön, Herr Architekt, Karolina Simon, Theresa Lederova, but it is forbidden to give names, Herr Architekt, here we all have numbers. And he tries, raving, to enter the hospital before he forgets her face forever, before it can be wiped away forever by the cresyl and Formalin, the injections of sea water, the experiments with typhus and skin grafts, the transformations and exchanges of faces and hands and buttocks shuffled around in this laboratory where the entire universe is reordered, transplanted freely, without limit, to fulfill the image and semblance of an unspeakable and irrepeatable yet ultimately possible dream.