David Albahari - Götz and Meyer

haemoglobin , they would have thought he was speaking Chinese. Only later, as if the cloud had held them back, the corpses began tumbling out. The prisoners snapped their mouths shut, but their eyes came out on stalks and the veins on their necks bulged. One of them covered his nose, the second doubled over, the third prisoner’s knees shook so much that from a distance he looked as if he’d been drinking. If the German guards hadn’t shouted and used their rifle butts, who knows how long it would have taken for the Serbian prisoners to recover! Afterwards they got used to it. A person gets used to everything, it doesn’t matter whether he is a barbarian or a member of the master race. It took the Serbian prisoners less than an hour to do their job, I read that somewhere, quite good time, and fitted neatly into the overall requirement for frugality and efficiency in handling this, which was, after all, what the entire functioning of the Reich was based on. Despite this, Götz on that occasion, and undoubtedly Meyer as well, regretted the enforced confidentiality of the task, which prevented him from speaking briefly to those Serbs about the advantages of carbon monoxide. They were permitted to talk about this to Commander Andorfer, but Commander Andorfer had never been interested in such things. It is quite certain that, as a former hotelier, he knew nothing about chemistry. Carbon monoxide, Götz, or Meyer, might have said, is a colourless gas, without fragrance or taste, something lighter than air, and it is produced by the combustion of carbon, or a substance containing carbon, which occurs without sufficient oxygen. The rapid combustion of fuel in the truck’s engine was an excellent example. Carbon monoxide condenses and turns into a liquid at temperatures of −192 °Celsius, freezes at −199 °Celsius and melts at −205°. It is poisonous for all warm-blooded animals, which includes all human beings, with the exception of the Germans and the Japanese. As little as a thousandth of a per cent of carbon monoxide in the air may provoke symptoms of poisoning — headaches, nausea, exhaustion — and a fifth of that same per cent is lethal in less than half an hour. The speed of dying, obviously, increases in proportion to the increase in concentration of the gas, which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt Götz and Meyer’s belief that an even shorter journey would have sufficed to ensure success. Now comes the part that Götz or Meyer, would have enjoyed telling the most, if only he had been allowed to, and it has to do with the mechanism by which carbon monoxide acts in the blood of these animals: Russians, Jews, homosexuals and mentally disabled Germans, who weren’t real Germans anyway, because a genuine member of the German race is physically, mentally and sexually completely fit and always as he should be. Götz and Meyer were excellent specimens, especially Meyer, if not Götz as well, who had impeccably developed biceps, triceps and glutei maximi. For a person to live, he needs oxygen, even those Serbian prisoners probably knew that, and he can absorb oxygen into his organism thanks to the presence of haemoglobin in his bloodstream. The oxygen forms bonds with the haemoglobin in the red blood cells, so that it is carried to all parts of the body. This haemoglobin, however, shows an unconcealed inclination to bond with carbon monoxide, which is as much as two to three hundred times as strong as its inclination to bond with oxygen, so, given the opportunity to choose, it will, like an unfaithful spouse, devote itself to the carbon monoxide. Once bonded, the haemoglobin and carbon monoxide create a stable compound of carboxyhaemoglobin, which spreads quickly and reduces the amount of faithful haemoglobin that rushes into the embrace of pure oxygen. Without oxygen, of course, the pulse grows fainter, the respiratory system fails, tissues die like flies, coma sets in, and, in the end, so does death. The devastated organism is relieved that the torment is over, and death is salvation. Since carboxyhaemoglobin has a characteristic cherry-red hue — Götz, or it could be Meyer, always clucks his tongue when referring to cherries — these asphyxiated victims do not turn blue as others do, rather their skin acquires a pinkish tinge and their lips turn bright red. This explains why the Serbian prisoners are thinking: “Lipstick” as the first heap of corpses tumbles towards them. They can guess why the women might be wearing lipstick, but they have not been able to explain to themselves why it is on the lips of the children and the elderly. In work such as theirs, however, you quickly learn not to ask questions, especially about Jews. Götz and Meyer wouldn’t tell them anything about that anyway, not because they didn’t know, but because there was no point in wasting words about Jews. It was enough that they had consumed so much fuel. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that the Jews themselves had paid for the fuel required for their transport from the Fairgrounds to Jajinci, since they’d paid for everything else so far, including food, medicine and heating. The Belgrade archives hold the considerable correspondence between the Jewish Administration and the German Command Staff, with its competent services within the Municipality of Belgrade, regarding the procuring of foodstuffs, medicine and the camp inventory. In the beginning I carefully copied out all the dates, and then I gave up, lost in the tons of food and cords of firewood, revolted by so much bureaucracy at a time when life was draining from the prisoners in the camp like water from wet rags. The setting up of the Jewish Administration was one of those sly tricks by which the Nazis organised their entire system of deceiving Jews, convincing them that the camps were merely reception centres on their way to some undesignated country, a huge ghetto that would belong to them alone. If something wasn’t going well at the camp, then the only ones to blame would be the Jewish Administration. The Germans were here merely to help and advise, you could say nothing against them. Later, when Götz and Meyer went there, and their truck became a part of the dreary everyday routine of the camp prisoners, the members of the Administration and their families were saved until the last transport. No need to wonder why this was so: clearly the Administration had to oversee the schedule of departures to the end, the quality of the transportation and the nutrition of those who still hadn’t left. The same order of things would have held true in the real world, outside the camp, and as long as life in the camp was reminiscent, in no matter how reduced a form, of the life that was going on somewhere else, chances are the prisoners would be calm and patient, waiting for their fate. This concern of the German Government for the good of the prisoners is touching, I think I’ve already said that, but at the Fairgrounds it did bear fruit. None of the incarcerated Jews tried to run away, not even after the pattern had become clear and you needed much greater willpower to continue to deceive yourself. During the first three months, when hunger reigned in the camp, it was only some of the bolder little boys, judging by the statements of witnesses, who sneaked through the barbed-wire fence and went off to Zemun to beg for food. They knew that if they were caught as they slipped back in, they would be cruelly beaten, but their hunger was stronger. Hunger is always stronger, I dare say, although I have no experience of starvation, except for the fast at Yom Kippur, which I have been keeping stubbornly, though I can’t say why, for the last twenty years. Götz and Meyer didn’t know even that much about hunger, since they didn’t know what Yom Kippur was. My guess is that they had never seen Jews either, especially if they came from a small Austrian or German town, until they were given their special assignment. It is also my guess that among those who sneaked out through the barbed-wire fence there weren’t any of my twelve young cousins, because I could never muster the strength to do something like that myself, and this leads me to believe, knowing my father’s timidity and my mother’s shyness, that this is a character trait handed down from one generation to the next in their families. Some people stride forward to embrace their fates; others, like my parents, wait for fate to come to them. It would not be good to conclude on the basis of this that the first is better than the other, because in the end fate is what counts, and not the circumstances leading up to it, just as one shouldn’t think that I am dissatisfied with myself. I have found myself wondering sometimes whether things might have been different if there had been risk takers in our family tree, people from that first group. My mother’s decision to go off to the village with me in her arms could be interpreted as taking a risk, but as I later learned in an entirely coincidental encounter in the rooms of the Jewish Historical Museum, she decided to do that only because she couldn’t refuse a request from her best friend, also a Jewish woman and the mother of two little children, to go with her. This won’t last long, her friend claimed, a few months and it will all blow over. They stayed, we stayed, in that village for more than three years, with my mother’s constant complaints that it would have been so much better for her in Belgrade, even when the rumours reached them about the camp at the Fairgrounds. By then, however, it was no longer the Judenlager Semlin, but the Anhaltenlager Semlin — the Zemun Reception Camp — the Jews were all gone. Götz and Meyer had long since returned to Berlin with their incapacitated truck. What sort of group did they belong to, those who seek their fate or those who wait for it patiently, shifting from one foot to the other? For me every driver is someone seeking his own fate, if not provoking it, and this is why I have never learned to drive, but that cannot be taken as a yardstick in conditions of war. I must be fair to Götz and Meyer, I often thought, not only because of their cautious drive to Jajinci but just for the sake of being fair. They, too, had the right to be misled and hoodwinked as much as the Jewish prisoners did, I can’t possibly deny that. But all I had to do was picture one of them crouching to move the exhaust pipe of the truck over, and everything in me would be smashed to bits. Their load was still alive then, the trip had only just begun, and the brief stop did not arouse any doubts among the Jews. They were far more disturbed by the fact that they were travelling in the dark and that there was no room for them to get more comfortable. They felt the aluminium-covered walls and the wooden flooring, they touched each other and thanked the Lord that they weren’t blind, it would be so terrible to live in eternal darkness, and then, with a shudder, the truck set off again, they could hear the engine rumbling good-naturedly, they could even smell the fuel, well that’s all right, at least they were back on the road again, just so they’d never have to return to the cold and the hunger. If they could have, they probably would have shouted to Götz and Meyer to drive a little faster, to get as far from there as possible, to pay no attention to their nausea and mild headaches, surely from all the jouncing around and lack of fresh air, these were just little discomforts compared to what they were leaving behind. They had no idea how much further and airier than anything they had imagined those distances would be. And Götz, and Meyer, drove along, whistling, exchanging jokes. Every job done according to a strictly defined formula becomes tedious in time. At first it is interesting, the second time confirms the first, by the fifth time it inspires annoyance, by the tenth it is routine, and by the fifteenth time Götz, or maybe it was Meyer, announces that he could drive to Jajinci with his eyes closed. Meyer, or was it Götz, who is always extra cautious, feels that it is probably a better idea to drive with your eyes open, all it takes is for a cat to cross your path, not even a black one, and everything acquires a new dimension, a new meaning. Götz, or Meyer, shrugs this off. There is no such cat, he says, which could stop the victorious advance of the German Reich, not even in a land as wild as this Serbia is, where the cats scratch more than they did back in the Fatherland. Then they fall silent. Both of them are thinking of the cats they used to know: Götz, or maybe Meyer, thinks of a Siamese cat which his maiden aunt used to comb every day and feed with all sorts of treats, while Meyer, or maybe it was Götz, recalls a tiny striped cat that used to come into their garden, and he put its eye out with a stone from his slingshot. And then he sinks into fantasies about flying a fighter plane. It isn’t nice, but there are times when he wishes that his fellow traveller would become ill, nothing too serious: a slightly worse cold with a bad cough, just enough so that he could be alone in the truck for one day, and then he’d put on his pilot’s cap by the obligatory open window. It never happened, and if it did, there is no written trace of it. They were healthy lads, sturdy and resilient like all true members of the SS, not like those nobodies behind them to whom everything stuck like flies to flypaper. How much time had to pass for the required fifth of a per cent to accumulate? And did the diameter of the exhaust pipe, no less than 58 nor greater than 60 millimetres, have a part to play in this? What would have happened if it had been larger? Or smaller? Look at what I have been filling my head with since I turned 50. I fill page after page with figures and information which I copy from books with fragile pages in archival cellars, although I have no idea what to do with most of it. For instance, on the basis of the report of the acting chief of the Section for Social Welfare and Social Institutions of the Municipality of Belgrade, written on April 17th, 1942, precisely 1,341,950 meals were issued to feed Jews at the Fairgrounds camp. What do I divide that by? If I presume that there were 5,500 Jews at the camp on average every day, and that no food was delivered right from the very first day, it works out that every one of them received nearly two full meals per day, more precisely: 1.96 meals per day. But if one knows that the number of delivered meals is based on the total amount of delivered foodstuffs, most of which were not edible to begin with, that produces a rather different figure, around 1.3 meals per day. The food at the camp was served up with spoons of various sizes, only some of which corresponded to the standard of four decilitres, and this, as well as the fact that during April the number of prisoners dropped dizzyingly, sends this calculation into the sphere of higher mathematics, at least it does for me, a teacher of the Serbo-Croatian language and the literatures of the Yugoslav peoples. It is no wonder that I can’t sleep night after night, and that in the morning, when I go down to the corner shop, I find myself counting loaves of bread in delivery crates, multiplying that number by the number of crates, and then multiplying that by the average weight of a loaf and, finally, dividing by 150 grams, which was what the prisoners at the Fairgrounds, according to the testimony of witnesses, received daily. One night, exhausted by all the figures, I dreamed of Götz, or maybe it was Meyer. We were sitting, he and I, in the cockpit of a fighter plane, crammed into the single pilot’s seat, and he told me, in Serbian but with a strong German accent, the figures on the number of shells and machine-gun rounds, the fuel consumption and the flight speed, and finally he turned to me and said that he had given away 327 chocolates. In my dream, just as when I’m awake, he had no face, the earflaps and ties on his pilot’s cap framed a space of whiteness. Only his lips were bright red, as if he had applied a thick layer of lipstick. I leaned over and looked out of the window, and below, quite clearly, I could see the blueprints for the Belgrade Fair, precisely as it was imagined by the architects Milivoje Tričković, Rajko Tatić and Djordje Lukić. And now, said Götz, or maybe it was Meyer, we will look at all of this up close, the plane began to plummet with a piercing whine, straight for the blueprint of the Central Tower, and, with a shriek, I woke. I lay in the dark, afraid to breathe. But if before I could have been in a plane, now I might be in the back of the Saurer, and the longer I held my breath, the longer I’d be able to preserve my soul. How long can a person hold his breath? Half a minute, one minute, two? I counted to 38 to myself, my lungs bursting. I gasped and gulped greedily at the air. In the flat above me I could hear soft footsteps and knew that it was my soul, cloaked in a garment of the thinnest light, moving lightly along a path I still had to discover. Götz and Meyer wouldn’t care for this frequent mention of souls, as I have said before. According to them, a person is a sack, and when everything is shaken out of the sack, it is over. All that is left is the rag, and rags are no good for anything. Sometimes, when they’d clean out the truck in the yard of the police station, Götz and Meyer would find odds and ends: a child’s shoe, a comb, a blurred photograph, a crust of bread, a handkerchief, a nail file, a brooch. Götz, or Meyer, would drop these things into a paper bag; Meyer, or Götz, preferred not to touch them. Nothing sadder than things without owners, even he knew that, just as he knew that the time of the Reich was a time of joy and little things like these dared not degrade it. How old were Götz and Meyer? One more question I can’t answer. When one of my students is unable to answer a question, for example on the structure of a wreath of sonnets, I do not hesitate to enter, first in my notebook and then in the register, a bad grade. If I were to apply the same criteria to myself, I would have been held back long ago. So it goes with history, the woman told me from whom I’d heard the story about my mother. She compared history to a big crossword puzzle. For every little square you fill, there are three more empty, she said, and even if you manage to fill them, new ones open up immediately, even emptier. Knowledge can never catch up with the power of ignorance. It seemed to me that I had read that somewhere before, but I no longer had the strength to open new little empty squares in myself. That was what I said to the woman who sat across from me and in whose spectacles I could clearly see my own baffled countenance reflected. She shook her head sadly. It is terrible, she said, to live in history, and even more terrible to live outside it. If she had given me the precise solution to my crossword puzzle, she couldn’t have surprised me more. I saw how the face reflected in her glasses — or, in fact, two identical faces side by side — shuddered and licked their lips, powerless to come up with any sort of response. In the end I mumbled that it reminded me of the folk tale about the dark lands. History is a dark land, the woman smiled, you’re damned if you venture in and damned if you don’t. Whatever you do you’ll regret it forever. I said nothing. Even Götz, or Meyer, couldn’t extricate me from that one. For a while longer I poked around in the volumes of documents, as if I were sorting through grains of rice to pick out the pebbles, and then I slipped outside, afraid that if I stayed, I’d lose myself completely in the lenses of her glasses. I walked down 7th of July Street clutching my satchel with papers and books under my arm, and turned into Gospodar Jovanova Street. According to a variety of sources, as many as four of my relatives lived here with their families. One of them was the man Haim, later gloriously renamed Benko, the only one for whom I knew the date of death. Or, more precisely: I could place the date of his death within the four or five days when they were exterminating the doctors and patients of the Jewish hospital in Visokog Stevana Street, which seems pretty precise compared with the span of fifty days or so during which the transports went on from the Fairgrounds camp. When the rest of Belgrade’s Jews were transported to the camp on December 8, 1941, the staff and patients at the Jewish hospital were spared. Apparently — a poor word to use when speaking of history, I realise that, but it cropped up from the empty little squares of the crossword puzzle — so, apparently, there was a plan to move the entire hospital to the Nikola Spasić Foundation pavilion, which never happened, although part of the hospital’s equipment was moved to that pavilion, to the camp infirmary, so that the medical staff, at least temporarily and ostensibly, was spared the horrors of residing at the camp. The Jewish hospital was opened in the summer of 1941, and during the winter months it quickly filled with patients from the camp, so that by March 1942, when Götz and Meyer’s truck docked at its door like some big boat, there were about five hundred patients at the hospital. The day before, all the Jewish doctors and other staff had been arrested, with their families, and all of them were also being held at the hospital, putting the total number at over seven hundred souls. By March 22 or possibly 23, the hospital was empty, and the souls were wafting through the spacious skies over Jajinci. There is an assumption — yet another word unsuited to history — that this was a sort of rehearsal for the much larger and more serious job at the Fairgrounds, and it is certain that Götz and Meyer did their job well, and that Schäfer, Andorfer and Enge and many other leaders could breathe a sigh of relief, and even pat each other on the back. One can therefore conclude that Götz and Meyer had arrived in Belgrade two or three days earlier, so they did not have a chance to see the town, although they would certainly do so later, mostly from the truck but also on short strolls, which Götz was better at, though it may have been Meyer. Meyer, or possibly Götz, preferred to sleep in his spare time, and he never complained that his dreams disturbed him. You couldn’t say the same for Götz, or was it Meyer, who often awoke at night, sometimes making a lot of noise, and then he’d go out for a walk to get a bit of fresh air. I doubt that his conscience played any part in this, I’m inclined to attribute it all to poor digestion. Haim himself, as a doctor, would have said as much to Götz, or Meyer, had he only had the opportunity to ask him amid the pandemonium when they loaded everyone onto the truck in front of the Jewish hospital. There was none of this tumult a few days later when the same truck began stopping in at the Fairgrounds. Here things were quiet, and there was even enthusiasm at the thought of leaving, which certainly pleased Götz and Meyer, and they made no effort to hide it. Everyone likes being appreciated in the work place, why not Götz and Meyer? Meyer even confessed to me that he felt his heart beat faster and that later, when he recalled those days, he would shiver. Look at this: I am beginning to imagine myself talking with people whose faces I don’t even know. I knew precious little, indeed, about the faces of most of my kin, but in their case I can at least look at my own face in the mirror and seek their features there, whereas with Götz and Meyer I had no such help. Anyone could have been Götz. Anyone could have been Meyer, and yet Götz and Meyer were only Götz and Meyer, and no-one else could be who they were. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that I constantly had this feeling that I was slipping, even when I was walking on solid ground. The void that was Götz and Meyer so contrasted with the fullness of my relatives, if not of their real beings at least of their deaths, that my every attempt to reach fullness required that first I had to pass through void. For me to truly understand real people like my relatives, I had first to understand unreal people like Götz and Meyer. Not to understand them: to conjure them. Sometimes I simply had to become Götz, or Meyer, so I could figure out what Götz, or Meyer (really I), thought about what Meyer, or Götz (really I), meant to ask. This Götz who was not really Götz spoke to this Meyer who was not really Meyer. My hands tremble a little when I think of it all. Nothing easier than to stray into the wasteland of someone else’s consciousness. It is more difficult to be master of one’s own fate; simpler to be master of someone else’s. In the morning, while I dressed, I’d be Götz and Meyer. I did not allow myself to be distracted by details, for instance: wondering whether German soldiers wore short-sleeved undershirts, or dog tags with their personal details round their necks. I always wore singlets, cut high under the armpits, important because I sweat so much, and nothing was going to make me stop wearing them. This was about something else. I would look at myself, let’s say, in the mirror and say: Now Meyer is combing his hair, and then Götz would ask Meyer what he’d be having for breakfast. Once I got up in a foul mood, as Götz, and when asked that same question, told Meyer angrily: bananas. Lord, how Meyer laughed. His razor bounced around in his hand! Later, when he rinsed off the foam, he noticed a little nick on his left cheek, but that only reminded him of Götz’s reply, and then he burst into guffaws again. Götz didn’t say anything, because by then he was already in the kitchen, where he watched as I made coffee. Quite the bright one, that Götz, never to put the cart before the horse. As they drove towards Belgrade, he never carped to Meyer, possibly Götz, about speeding. It is important to tend to State property entrusted to your care, but even more important to tend to good relations with your work colleagues, since your success in completing any assignment depends far more on that than on anything else. Speaking of carts and horses, I should say that Götz and Meyer fussed over their Saurer as if it were some rare thoroughbred horse: they groomed it, cleaned and washed it, changed its tyres as if they were horseshoes, filled it with the finest petrol, and if there had been a way for them to give it sugar cubes, I am sure they would have done. You can hardly blame them for being so dejected when the Saurer’s rear axle broke. Götz and Meyer were only human, after all. I have a feeling that the woman at the Jewish Historical Museum didn’t like that. She was silent for so long, looking right into my eyes, that in the end I wondered if she hadn’t heard me so I repeated what I had said. Indeed they were, said the woman, there can be no doubt about that. But what sort of human? It is incredible, the degree to which other people are so much better at grasping the essence of something which eludes us. Really, what sort of human beings were Götz and Meyer? What kind of man would, like the two of them, consent to do a job that meant putting five or six thousand souls to death? I find it hard to give a student a bad grade at the end of the semester, let alone at the end of the year, but that is nothing compared to the way Götz and Meyer must have felt. Or what if they felt nothing at all? I could stare all I wanted to in the mirror, to fill the voids of their faces with mine, but I still couldn’t come up with an answer. I went over to the family tree hanging on the wall, framed like some sort of abstract drawing. As always I felt only pain, a dull pain, I started losing breath, gasping like a carp out of water, and I could do nothing but rush outdoors, although all those walks ended up with my going to stand in front of one of the houses where my relatives used to live, or to the Fairgrounds, where I tried to picture the ice. That winter, the winter between 1941 and 1942, was so cold, it is no wonder some of the prisoners said openly that everyone, even God, had forsaken them. No matter how many clothes you wore, no matter how thick your coat or cloak, the cold would creep into your limbs and find its way to your heart. And when the heart is cold, there is no fire hot enough to warm you. The fire that burned in the heaters in the Fairgrounds pavilions could hardly have warmed limbs, let alone hearts. In vain the camp administration sent letters to the Municipality of Belgrade requesting larger amounts of firewood and, on one occasion, ten wedges for splitting stumps. A stump is a stump, and experienced woodsmen would give up on those knots that skewed saw teeth and blunted axes. The children wept, the elderly died, the women who went off to forced labour lost chunks of flesh and patches of skin from their arms. It was enough to bump into something, a witness said, and frostbite would form there immediately. I am someone who gets cold easily, and at the very thought of how cold it was my teeth start chattering; even tea couldn’t warm me then. Even today, for instance, my ear hurts where it froze, once, when I was a boy on the Tara Mountain. It’s my left ear, I often stroke the left lobe while I teach new material. Twelve years ago on television they showed a detective comedy involving Freemasons, and, at least in that series, they would recognise one another by touching their left earlobe. Ever since then, the students have called me Freemason. Did Götz and Meyer have nicknames? Would it change anything if I were to learn that their wives, if they were married, had pet names for them, something like Teddy Bear or Big Boy? By the way, in a list of Belgrade Freemasons I found the names of three of my relatives, two from my father’s side and one from my mother’s. There are secret threads that always surface, you just have to be patient. I count the frostbitten ear as one such thread, but also the fact that as a boy, I liked to stand behind cars and breathe in what I now know to be poisonous fumes. A small amount of carbon monoxide produces a mild sense of dizziness, and I probably found in that sensation a little joy or comfort in a world that, even then, seemed far too hostile, strict, and rigid. I am referring to the things, of course, that make the world what it is, not politics, I want to be sure that is perfectly clear. I knew nothing at that point about politics, or about the gas truck; after all, when I first happened upon the term “soul-swallower” in reference to the truck, my initial association was with some mythical creature, a being that delighted in plucking the feathers of life from weeping souls the way women plucked feathers from butchered chickens. In one sense, you might say, I was right, only because in a “soul-swallower” truck the soul plucks its own feathers in a bid to shed its ballast as soon as possible and soar skywards, as high as possible, where the air is still pure. In an encyclopaedia I found a map marking all the places where gas trucks were used by the SS. Most of the places were within the Soviet Union, a dozen in the Reich, and in only one case did the little dots upset the balance and dip southwards to Belgrade and the Fairgrounds. Seven hundred thousand people, it said in that same encyclopaedia, were killed in those vehicles, and that means that since some thirty gas trucks were produced, here I go calculating again, on average around twenty thousand people were asphyxiated in each. The calculation is incomplete because it does not consider the differences in capacity between the two models, the Saurer and the Diamond, but I wasn’t able to work that out. If I had a better grasp of mathematics, I wouldn’t be teaching literature, in which, unlike any true science, every interpretation has equal value, while as you increase precision you decrease overall quality, or, rather, you undermine the work itself. If a literary work is not in constant motion, I told my students, then it is not a work but a blind alley of the human spirit. The students nodded, their pencils hurried along the lines on their notebook pages, their lips silently repeated the thought I had just voiced. The first gas trucks were used in November 1941, in Ukraine, and then they dispersed in all directions: to Leningrad, Sebastopol, Berlin, Majdanek, Lvov, Piatigorsk, Danzig and Vienna. In comparison with these vast expanses, Götz and Meyer’s journey to Belgrade seems like a little side trip, perhaps needless or hasty, especially if you keep in mind the smallness of the job and the digression from the already established routes of movement. But some things are logical precisely because they cannot be explained by any other logic, right? Exactly, Götz and Meyer are logical precisely because they defy all other logic, as I don’t doubt that woman from the Jewish Historical Museum would say, with her glasses on or off, same difference. I resemble to myself that old rabbi of Prague who built a man-like creature of clay and breathed life into it, with the difference that I am trying to construct Götz and Meyer out of airy memories, unreliable recollection and crumbling archival documents. We know how the rabbi’s experiment turned out: the clay being rebelled against its creator, the rabbi just barely managed, standing on his toes, to erase one of the letters inscribed on the creature’s forehead, changing the wordЧитать дальше