H. Adler - The Journey

You were evicted, my dear Lustigs, so how can you be surprised? It never occurred to us that you would be able to come back. Gone is gone, no one complained about your leaving. But let’s have a look at you! Turn left! Now right! Turn around! My goodness, it can’t be you! You have no way of proving your identity. We won’t let ourselves be fooled for a moment, the Lustigs looked completely different! What have you done with Dr. Lustig? As long as you cannot produce the doctor, there’s no way that we can believe you. You claim that he’s dead because so much time has passed. We understand. Either everyone is dead or no one is dead. Aha, it’s because he was already so old, and the accommodations in Ruhenthal were not enough to prolong the life of an old man? That’s quite a story, but we’re not that dumb. You’re a pack of swindlers, nothing but swindlers who want to take advantage of changed relations. You were taken away from here, we know, but that wasn’t done in order to keep you safe throughout the war like pickles packed in a jar that one simply opens in order to happily pick you up and bring you back healthy. We never believed that for a moment. We said nothing then because we felt bad about your future. What they did to you pained us! No one should be treated like that. But rest assured, we had a pretty good idea of what would happen, even if we didn’t know for sure. The newspapers made it clear enough between the lines that you were only hauled off from here in order to spare us the repulsive sight of your extermination. That’s why you were neatly sucked up, as if by a vacuum cleaner, everyone straight into the dust bag, all of you off, eins zwei!

Curtains were drawn between you and us, everything blacked out for miles on end. Open executions no longer took place because they stirred up bad feelings. Everything was kept hidden. The papers wrote only about penalties and fines, yet the spilled blood blackened, though nothing is left of it for the public to see today. Were you just dumped somewhere? Did walls swallow you up? They provide good protection, a guarantee of society’s good intentions, barbed-wire camps a demonstration of our mercy, for they don’t look so bad from a distance, just obstinate fortresses, ghostly castles out of fairy tales with proud little towers and battlements and ramparts. Live well, you criminals, but not in our backyard, instead spare us through your absence! Yet you claim that you’ve been done an injustice? Could be, but we don’t want to, nor can we look into that, for the authorities are the ones who ordered it, thus it just happened. To doubt the good of what once happened is not our way. Okay, you say that you were not stuck in some fairy-tale castle. That could also be because they didn’t want to fill the noble cells of the jail in our magisterial city of Stupart in order to protect the guards from recriminations by letting you be hauled off. You should have run away and hidden! But your pursuers wouldn’t have stood for that. Which is why they hauled you off and took you far away. Long was the journey, long. Don’t look so ridiculous, we know it was murder and not something pleasant. But we couldn’t do anything about it, that’s the way of the world. Onward and onward, summer and winter, through frost and heat, back and forth, without light and air, sixty at a time or a hundred crowded into a box, packed in, sealed off, without food and water. You should have died from that, but whoever came through was yanked from the box and tossed away.

To that you have nothing else to say. Fine, for thus you are exposed, you are not what you are! Aren’t you ashamed to carry the noble name of Lustig? You must leave this apartment instantly! Off with you! Try elsewhere, if you want. The possessions of the dear Lustigs? That’s carrying shamelessness a bit too far! No, the lovely, lovely, expensive things, we have stored them all away, but for the real Lustigs, if they should ever return, ah, how we hope it will happen, for we were so fond of them. You can’t imagine what we indeed did for them! We would have loved most of all to have saved them! They were such good people, they never did anyone any harm, we can attest to the fact that they were always so good, so upstanding, so pleasant, each of them possessed a heart of gold, especially the dear doctor, yes, you must have known him! Now, there was a man! We’ll never see the likes of him again! His winter coat? His gold watch? Are you crazy? We still have to take care of their things. We’re very careful with them, everything is looked after and dusted, even Frau Lustig’s jewelry, those earrings that were a wedding gift, two large black pearls, big as eyes, and then the fur, which was properly cleaned, and we spread mothballs between the clothes and underwear. It all takes a good deal of effort, but we do it gladly, because it’s for the dear Lustigs. Indeed, if they don’t return, our hearts will simply break, there’s no way to express how sad that would be! That’s why we have to keep watch over their things; perhaps Albert Schwarz will show up one day, the dear nephew from America, for there is no telling that he won’t someday inherit everything. If he can prove who he is, then we must turn everything over to him, every last item, just as we listed them in the records. Then everything will be gone, though thank goodness not everything, really, for after having taken care of everything for many years we will certainly have to be compensated. Indeed, all of this stuff takes up so much room that we can hardly move in our own apartment. First, the many carpets that we have to lay on top of one another since we have no vacuum cleaner, then the many paintings on the walls, almost as if it were a museum, and all the glassware, the porcelain, the boy removing the thorn in the glass case! For years us poor folks couldn’t tend to our own things and had to sell some of them just to be able to take care of everything for the Lustigs.

Zerlina turns pale, all the joy of having returned now drained from her. People don’t believe Zerlina, the apartment doors open only a crack, because it doesn’t help that she also remembers the past, for all that was in the past and among good friends is simply forgotten. They shake their heads innocently and are sad because none of the dear Lustigs will see their home again nor learn what selfless, loyal friends they had, who spared no sacrifice to save what they could manage to save. For a stranger, however, they can do nothing, no matter how much it hurts, no matter where they have come from, since the friends already have many other responsibilities. They have to think of their own families during the dark days after the war. The country is poor, the need is like it’s never been, there’s hardly any bread to buy, nothing in the stores, clothes hang in rags, such poor, poor people.

Zerlina turns away out of pity. She hasn’t the strength to console the righteous, who think themselves unfairly treated after having suffered so much. Zerlina knows she will encounter much bitterness in this big, strange city in which everything looks the same, but nothing is as it once was. It’s a dead, destroyed city, although the stones are still stuck together. The bombs have not smashed the walls, even though Stupart has long since died, despite there being more people wandering the main streets than before the war, the same businesses showing their wares, the same red streetcars rolling on the tracks. It’s no longer the city in which Zerlina was born, in which she grew up and lived. It may be the same city, still called Stupart, but it’s an endless cemetery of mass graves between which Zerlina cannot find her way. Not a single recognizable tomb is here, neither familiar nor unfamiliar names, because the dear dead that once lay here have been yanked out and their bones strewn throughout the world, there being no way to bring them back together again.