David Albahari - Götz and Meyer

when, how and where , but no-one questions the initial assumption any more. With its meaninglessness it forges new meaning, crystal clear, and thereafter that is held up as the measure of all other meaning. You are on the right track, say Götz and Meyer, and wink at me in unison. I’d never seen Götz and Meyer, I could only imagine them. I imagined them hacking at chunks of mountain crystal with powerful blows and building the wall before which I stand, fifty years later, a limp little lamb. I’m sure that this notion of immutable transparency occurred to those prisoners, back then, but they saw themselves inside some sort of glass ball, exposed to the world’s uncaring eyes, teetering on the brink of a downward slope. Their ball rolled away, my wall stood there, still. Then I remembered that I’d read somewhere that there are no outer walls, only inner ones, and that we must climb out from inside if we wish to overcome what rises before us outside. Okay, okay, I said to Götz and Meyer, who were nodding eagerly, but how can someone proceed if he has never even discovered the way that leads to the outer doors? Götz and Meyer shook their heads helplessly. Perhaps I am expecting too much of them, they are, after all, only ordinary people, practical, skilled at something that requires no questions or answers. And what is so bad about that, asks Götz, or maybe Meyer, in a tone bordering on the surly, and is there anyone who knows, who genuinely knows, that he wouldn’t act precisely the same way in our place? I don’t know what to answer him and whether there is such an answer. I don’t know why I am talking with him in front of the prisoners scowling at us through the barbed-wire fence. They are convinced that I am getting in the way of their departure that started out so nicely, that I am dissuading the people who, with their arrival from far away, have brought a glimmer of light into the prisoners’ lives. And indeed, at first, when Götz and Meyer’s Saurer arrived, the prisoners raced to see who would be the first to travel. Commander Andorfer, I imagine, must have rubbed his hands with glee. Later, when some of the members of the Jewish Administration had begun to show some doubt, Andorfer fumed and, his language harsh, leaning on his arms as he spoke, said that doubt was one of the greatest human frailties, he wanted no weaklings in his camp, whatever would become of the Reich if the Führer allowed himself to be enticed, even for a moment, by doubt, and would he, Andorfer, be sitting with them had he doubted his own words, and why doesn’t someone deal out those cards? But doubt is like sourdough: once you make it, it keeps rising. Since Götz and Meyer’s truck always stood outside the camp, and only the select had access to it, the prisoners, according to witness statements, tried to make use of another truck, the one for transporting each group’s personal belongings. They agreed that when the trucks reached their destination, the people who had been taken away were to leave a message in a predetermined spot inside the truck, letting the others know where they had been unloaded. It couldn’t be so hard to do, surely they would be unloading their own things from the truck, certainly the Germans wouldn’t be doing something like that for them, but no search of the truck, when it returned to the camp the next day, ever produced any sort of result. The dead, of course, don’t write. Souls communicate in a different tongue. But there were always those for whom this meant nothing, for whom proof was not proof, after all pencilled messages are so easily misplaced and dust can parch the lips. Nothing had changed, nothing could change. The women and children, the occasional elderly person, sometimes even a man or two, and one of the medical staff continued climbing up, day after day, into the Saurer, though with flagging enthusiasm. Commander Andorfer ordered that if there weren’t enough volunteers, they would start drawing up transport lists, but everything continued as planned, without much resistance, without a fuss, because as long as there was hope, there was a chance it might be borne out, wasn’t there? And besides, nothing warms hope like a full stomach, and in April and May 1942, judging by the documents that have been preserved, there were no complaints about the amount and quality of the delivered food. Since the number of prisoners was dropping, they were all finally being served with spoons of the same size, the stew was thicker, the bits of potato more numerous, the corn mush a little less watery. Some children even got sweets two or three times from Götz, or Meyer, which would have been unthinkable before. I asked Götz, or possibly Meyer, why the sweets, didn’t that seem just a tad hypocritical? No, said Götz, or possibly Meyer, because when a person works at a monotonous job, he needs some respite, otherwise there is the danger that he might lose his élan and, worst of all, that he might ultimately turn into an automaton, which, though precise, would function with less of a will. Indeed, I concede. We talked in my room. A recording of Mozart’s music was playing on the turntable. We sat and smoked and listened to the sounds coming from the bathroom, where, as he always did on Sunday afternoon, Meyer, or maybe Götz, was splashing in a tub full of bubbles. He always took a long time to bathe, was capable of playing with yellow duckies and a little red boat for hours, and later, without the slightest compunction, stroll buck naked around the flat looking for his clothes. Götz, or Meyer, was full of gratitude for the organisational capabilities of Untersturmführer Andorfer, since, he said, it was no mean feat to meet all the conditions for the normal functioning of a camp. For instance, he said, you had to make sure that all the members of one family got onto the same transport, and that the number of staff in the kitchen diminished proportionately to the decreasing number of prisoners, that you held on as long as possible to the cobblers and locksmiths, and that you coordinated the number of block commanders and camp policemen, and that, most important, the camp administration functioned impeccably. Did I have any idea, I was asked by Götz, or perhaps it was Meyer, how much effort was needed to coordinate all of that? I wonder, said Götz, or Meyer, does that man ever have time to sleep? There must be writing and erasing to be done, he went on, you couldn’t just write any old thing, there were essential acrobatics and somersaults and who knows what all, endless patience, for instance, let alone love for one’s work, and he had to have some sort of schematic plan, something like that web you have up there in the frame on the wall. He stopped, looking over at my family tree. Hey, he asked finally, what do all these people mean to you? I didn’t know what to say to him. I didn’t exactly know where Meyer, or was it Götz, was, had he gone out, by chance? If the postman ran into him, he would not fare well. And Commander Andorfer certainly had his hands full. The camp emptied quickly, he had to prepare his final accounting, determine the state of the supplies, draw up an inventory, make a list of essential repairs, run through his final checklist, and with all that goes a certain emotional tension, a feeling of rupture, a mild sort of grief, almost melancholy, that it was all over, with a dose of anxiety, of course, as to how it would be evaluated up there where things are evaluated. He wasn’t thinking of Heaven, he had Berlin in mind. Of course there were additional distasteful details to deal with, especially when it turned out that even with two round trips daily of Götz and Meyer’s truck, the camp was not emptying fast enough. Andorfer had to relent under pressure and reinstate the good old firing squad, which had an especially detrimental effect on Götz and Meyer, who saw this as belittling their efforts, as well as altogether underestimating the significance of scientific advancement. But little differences of opinion like that are possible in every job, and in such situations it is always a good idea to seek compromises rather than aggravate discord and weaken military and every other readiness. Whatever the case, on May 10, 1942 the last group of Jews was taken from the Fairgrounds camp, including the members of the Administration and their families, and what was left of the cooks, tradesmen and doctors. Once they were gone, a feathery cloud of silence descended on the camp. It rolled sluggishly round the emptiness of absence, and like a sponge it absorbed the sounds that tried to hide in the vacated pavilions, in the straw crushed between the boards of the cots, in the grease lining the bottoms of the kitchen pots, in the papers tossed on the floor of the Central Tower, in the shoes that were never picked up after they’d been re-soled. On the mounds between the third and fourth pavilions, spring had long since come, grass was beginning to sprout. There are no reliable witness statements on the subject, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. There were six women left in the camp, non-Jews, whose husbands and families had been taken off on various transports. They wandered the empty expanses of the camp for a week in deafening silence, bumping into one another. Sometimes it is like that: space which grows is actually shrinking, and what you used to long for becomes what you most dread. I fled, but no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get away from the cloud of silence that threatened to burst my eardrums. I hope, I told the woman at the Jewish Historical Museum, that one piece of the cloud, or maybe even a whole, tiny cloudlet, its close cousin, managed to reach Jajinci and the five, or seven, Serbian prisoners, and that it buffered, at least a little, the zing of the bullets that united them with those they had so devotedly sent to their last rest. That is the only consolation, I said, I could offer them. Yes, answered the woman, but history, unfortunately, is not meteorology. But the heart, I wanted to tell her, is a meteorologist. I didn’t say anything, I went down to the centre of town, to Terazije, hoping that the urban bustle would help me shake off the pain nesting in my ears. Then I assigned my students an essay on the theme “The Sound and the Fury”. I attended basketball games, sat in smoke-filled halls where people played bingo, drank beer in cafés where they were playing folk music. Nothing helped. Silence was crouching in my ear like a hermit crab in a snail shell, the way a crab carries its home across the ocean floor, the silence carried me deep under the surface of the world. The assessment of Jewish property began on December 9, 1941, when the first groups of Jews were sent to the Fairgrounds camp. And while frantic women and sobbing children got to know the inside of the pavilions that would be their homes for the next five months, though for some far fewer, the members of the commission for inventory and assessment of property compared their lists, rifled through boxes of keys, went into flats, measured and noted, underlined and collected. The flats and houses were already mute and cold, and like their owners they offered no resistance. It hurt them when the strange feet walked in, somewhere the parquet flooring creaked, somewhere the carpet moaned, but no-one noticed. There were places where, in the vases and flowerpots, the flowers had wilted and gave off a sweetish smell. In the mirror you could still see the pale shadows of the people who used to live there. Full pans and unwashed coffee pots still sat on the stoves. Books crowded the shelves, in glassed-in cupboards holiday dishes shone, hats and kerchiefs hung from coat racks. The doormats, always the most loyal, tried to slip down the stairs at night and flee into the street. Because of that, I am convinced, because of the loyalty of things, sales went at a snail’s pace, as it says in one book, and only ended in the autumn of 1943. The German authorities had lost patience long before and, in late summer 1942, handed all the Jewish property over to Serbia, receiving in return 360,000,000 dinars, which included compensation for damages to Germany during the war operations against Yugoslavia, as if the war had been fought only because of the Jews. And why was it that the war was fought? Götz and Meyer had no way of answering, and they looked at me as if I might answer their questions. I don’t know anything, I told them. Götz and Meyer raised their index fingers simultaneously and admonished me. You know how to turn us into lighthouses, they shouted, but you don’t know how to tell us over which shore or sea our light shines, how can that be? I replied that sea is too strong a word, that their light, a feeble light at best, was shining on a puddle, nothing more. I savoured, no point in pretending I didn’t, the wince of disgust flitting across the void of their faces. It seems to me, Götz, or Meyer, whispered to Meyer, or Götz, that he doesn’t like us. Meyer, or maybe Götz, said nothing. He shoved his hands into his pocket, pulled out a paper bag and offered me some chocolate. I put out my trembling fingers, ashamed of the loud gurgling sound that came from my stomach, took a chocolate, all dark and sticky, put it on my tongue, pushed it into my cheek, pressed it up against the roof of my mouth, and for an instant forgot everything, the cold and the hunger, the insomnia and the pain in my joints, the itching on my skin and scabs on my face, and I pranced around like a colt, like a kid, like a fawn, like all those animals in the picture books I had hidden under the straw bedding, and then I spread my arms and scampered back and forth, my knees high, making squeaky sounds and flying without a fumble into the spaces that opened up among people. Look at that kid, someone said, whizzing around like a plane. I opened my eyes. The wall clock was ticking softly, mutely, as if ashamed. Books were tossed around the room, files with photocopied documents, boxes of photographs, illustrated history books, statements from survivors, chronicles of war events, the memoirs of generals, diaries and letters. I didn’t dare to move. I stood there and felt how I was retreating more and more into myself, drowning. I closed my eyes. No, no, Götz and Meyer said in unison, that won’t help. I’d never seen them, I could only imagine them. There is no other way, said the rabbi at the funeral of my senile cousin, except the way that leads straight to the heart and then, purified, springs from the heart. If only I knew where the heart is, I mused, everything would be simpler. I packed up and went off to a village called S—. No-one remembered the thin woman with the little boy. They remembered a tall woman with a chubby little girl and a man with a moustache who told fantastic stories about distant cities. I went from house to house and stared at the chickens, but not a single one showed the slightest inclination to approach my open hand. I spent the night in an unpainted house in a room on the first floor, on a sofa bed that no-one had slept on before me. In the morning I spread kajmak cheese on a thick slice of bread and stepped into the dewy grass. Birds chirped in a little glade of trees up on the hill. I knew nothing about birds. It could have been a pygmy owl or a nutcracker, an oriole or a goldfinch, a thrush or a nightingale. You can’t tell? asked Götz and Meyer. Disgraceful! They said those words as clearly as if they were standing right there. I spun round. A dog was sitting on the threshold. Mother never let us keep animals in our flat. Father fought for an aquarium with tropical fish, but the condition was that, no matter what, there could be no more than five fish in it. More than five, Mother said, is a horde, not a school, of fish. I closed my eyes again. Then I raised my arm and, without looking, started walking. Back when I was a boy, I liked to close my eyes, said Götz, or possibly Meyer, and how wonderful, the world looked so much nicer that way. I was the one who was supposed to say that, not Götz, or possibly Meyer, impersonal creations that they were, though I can no longer say things in my own voice with any certainty. I tried to picture how the three of us looked as we sat on a bench in the park, Götz, or Meyer, to my right and Meyer, or Götz, to my left. Their faces empty, shadows moving across my face. At night, when I dream them, we hold hands. In the morning, when I get up, I rinse my hands for ages under cold water, scrub them with a small, bristly brush, rub them until the skin complains. I bring them carefully to my nose, as if I’m holding a crystal bowl. I see that someone is watching me from the mirror, but I pretend not to notice. My life, I say aloud in the middle of a lecture on romanticism, is like a memory that doesn’t know who is remembering it. The students look up, watch me, unblinking, briefly startled, then they shrug and quickly note down my words. If Götz and Meyer were to knock at your door tomorrow, I continue, what would you do? The students put down their pencils, look at each other, whisper. Who are Götz and Meyer, one girl finally asks, I mean, what did they write? They, I say, made pure poetry out of bodies. In rhymed verse? The question comes from the second row. In free verse, I respond, with a great deal of repetition. That means, says a boy from the first row, that they were before their time? I’d rather put it, I say, that they were outside time or, even better, that they did all they could to make time stand still. I confused them, no-one dared complain. Just in case, I touched my left earlobe. That reassured them. It reassured me. I am dangling from my earlobe like an earring, I am swaying like a pendulum, fluttering like a buttercup in a crack in a concrete path. The path leads nowhere, it ends, you might say, before it begins. Sir, says that first girl, I don’t get how this Götz and Meyer wrote poems in tandem, I always thought poetry comes out of solitude, inspiration, I don’t know, arrives from afar, and speaks with a language that is understandable, I guess, to one person alone, and then that one person translates it, right? into language all of us can understand. There is one thing you must understand when we are talking about Götz and Meyer, I say and release my earlobe. It seemed, I continue, as if there were two of them, but if you got under the skin a little, you would quickly have seen that the two were one and the same person. Hey, shouts a young man with a ponytail, like in that movie! He doesn’t say which, but I know what they watch, I can picture this product of futuristic genetics. Precisely, I say, as if they had been painted by the same brush, and furthermore, then there was an entire army of people who were all the same. And all of them, the girl asked, wrote poems? They never stopped, I say. My earlobe is burning, warning me, but there is no turning back. Allow me, I say, to recite one of their poems to you. I feel the students’ attention growing denser around me. I cough and say: Daniel, Isak, Jakov; Bukica, Estera, Sara; Solomon, Rafael, Haim; Rašela, Rifka, Klara. The class erupted in peals of laughter. I laughed with them, because only when I do that, opening my mouth wide and squeezing my eyes shut, can I hide the tears. Did Götz and Meyer ever burst into tears, except when they watched sappy romances in cinemas about poor girls falling into the hands of unscrupulous and ruthless capitalists? Tears are the most ordinary of excretions, Götz, or Meyer, said, while driving to Belgrade. They talked about all manner of things, it was a long trip, and so it was that they came to the subject of tears. I despise people who cry, said Meyer, or possibly Götz. Yes, replied Götz, or Meyer, real men never cry. Although, he said, growing solemn, I did cry when my aunt died. That doesn’t count, Meyer, or Götz, consoled him. I was sorry for her cat, said Götz, or Meyer, it miaowed so sadly as we lowered my aunt into her coffin. He bowed his head and pressed the corner of his eyes with his thumb and index finger, but when Meyer, or Götz, glanced over at him, he put it down to the grime. There certainly was grime, it’s not that there wasn’t, they could feel it between their teeth, touch it in their hair, even in their eyebrows, let alone on their uniforms. Every job has its downside, such is the order of things in the universe, and there is no point trying to change that. Take that brush and use it, Götz, or Meyer, must have told Meyer, or Götz, a thousand times if he’d told him once. If he’d been a pilot, which he had always wished he could be, at least he wouldn’t have had to worry about the grime. But the uniform is the pride of every SS officer, and clothing, despite that old saying, does, after all, make the man, and Meyer, or possibly Götz, dedicated himself assiduously to cleaning. That was why, after all, task forces always ordered their victims to strip before they were shot. Naked, they were no longer people, which had an auspicious effect on the firing squad, because it is always easier to kill people who are nothing. And besides, naked people don’t run away, mostly they try to shield their genitals and stand still, finding their last defence in a feeling of shame. The people who went into the “soul-swallower” still wearing their clothing at least weren’t shamed, and that is some sort of comfort, isn’t it? There is no comfort in death, the woman I met at the Jewish Historical Museum said, especially not in a death that someone else chooses for you. I wasn’t thinking of them, I shouted, but of myself, because those small consolations are the only weapon with which I can stand up to the meaningless and horrible void filling the faces of Götz and Meyer, and without them, without those small consolations, I would sink right to the bottom, I would accept that what happens represents an implacable order of things and not some monstrous distortion, that human dignity is an illusion, that nothing exists except the dark face of evil, which each of us carries within, some people have it closer to the surface of their being, some in their depths, and actually, it isn’t that we resist the repetition of evil, rather that sooner or later we recognise it in ourselves, joining with it in the end. I stopped talking, out of breath. I was always exhausted by long sentences, especially those which could have been said with fewer words, and even more by those that could have not been said at all. I never learned the lesson from that ancient saying that silence is a wall around wisdom. I talk until my mouth hurts, until my throat gets dry, until my larynx gets tied up in knots, as if words mean something, as if I could really save someone. Like a man who, lost in a forest, walks round in circles and keeps coming back to the place he started from, I keep starting from the beginning, closing my eyes to the failure of all my attempts. So I sat down, as if nothing had happened, and started writing letters to the military archives in Germany and Austria, to the documentation centres in Israel and America, even to Riga and Moscow, anywhere where there was the slightest possibility that I might stumble onto some trace. It is impossible, I figured, that Götz and Meyer vanished as if the earth had swallowed them up, although, in fact, it was easiest to imagine that off in the grass, by some road somewhere, their bones were rotting in an unmarked grave. In a couple of unmarked graves. No matter how odd it may sound, I did not wish for their death, rather I longed desperately for their life. I wanted to meet them, lively or decrepit old men, I wanted their faces to fill slowly with wrinkles or moles, see their teeth or hear the clacking of their dentures, sit with them on a bench in front of a house in a village or at the dining-room table in some old people’s home, to hear the air wheezing in their lungs, how their hearts beat and guts growled, to watch them leaning on sticks, blinking at the glaring neon light, the spittle pooling in the corners of their mouths. I wouldn’t ask them anything. I’d just sit there next to them and be quiet, and let my quiet wash over them. And then, when there was nothing left in them but that quiet, when they were swimming in it like fish in the sea, I wanted them to turn to me, and in their eyes, which had finally filled with colour, blue or brown, I would be able to see that they knew who I was though they had never seen me, and they would know that they had lost the chance to know me, I wanted to see them remember. At that point I could get up and go, but I’d stay a little longer. I would sit next to them and watch the sun set behind the hill and the shadows moving towards us with giant steps. That is that: that is the end of the road. In reality, however, the end of the road was nowhere in sight. The answers I received brought me no closer. They led me to the vast expanses of the Soviet Union, described camps and ghettoes in Poland, listed data on the killing of ailing Jewish children in Kislovodsk, listed names which meant nothing to me. In May 1942, Untersturmführer Dr August Becker visited, on assignment, several places where gas trucks had been used, with the objective of ascertaining their efficiency and proposing further guidelines. In his final report he mentioned two problems: the great mental pressure on the members of the SS who unloaded the trucks themselves, because they did not wish to entrust this job to prisoners who were prepared to take every available opportunity to escape, as well as a second problem, the frequent breakdowns resulting from the poor condition of Soviet roads. There is nothing to suggest that Dr Becker came to Belgrade. Had he done that, I don’t doubt that Götz and Meyer would have agreed with his second conclusion, keeping in mind the problem with the rear axle on their Saurer. However, in the case of the first problem, they could point to what had clearly been successful cooperation with the prisoners, who not only unloaded the trucks but buried the corpses, which had an exceptionally salutary effect on the German soldiers, so that during the work you could often hear their cheery banter; for all that, it was enough to promise the prisoners some sort of reward, in this case they were promised that when they had completed their work, they would be sent to a work camp in Norway. Götz and Meyer, of course, were not the masterminds behind this successful organisational structure, they would not want him to think they were taking credit for someone else’s accomplishments, far from it. They don’t know who deserves the credit, perhaps Commander Andorfer, but whoever came up with the idea showed that, with a little self-confidence, one can overcome problems which seem, at first, to be insoluble. Fine lads, Götz and Meyer, aren’t they now? Under other conditions, considering how diligent they were, surely they would have headed up a labour union. But, had he heard their testimony, Dr Becker would not have hesitated: gas trucks were good, especially when dealing with the smaller, more distant Jewish communities, but their effect was not sufficient for places with a larger concentration of Jews, where — again I reach for my calculator — the cost of maintaining a camp with stationary gas chambers and crematoria, with the use of a free labour force, was far cheaper than the cost of using the gas trucks and the extremely awkward involvement of military troops, who could be used to greater benefit elsewhere. In short, Götz and Meyer lost their job at some point. The gas trucks died out like dinosaurs. Making way for more perfect forms, camps functioning as death factories. Science must move forward, there can be no mercy here. Perhaps there were certain sentimental recollections, a tenderness stirred by the sentence: Do you remember those good old Saurers? But that would have been all, no trace of mercy, science has no time for such emotions, no time for any emotion, especially when such a vital task is involved. Eh, Götz and Meyer gestured dismissively, if we had been caught up in thinking like that, we never would have done anything. They are conscientious, they always arrive on time, they are calm and cheerful, their signatures are legible, their uniforms tidy, their step light. Nothing can be held against them. And then when Götz, or was it Meyer, walks into the camp and begins handing out chocolates! At times like that, Meyer, or was it Götz, who simply didn’t like children much, still was stabbed by jealousy now and again. That’s nice, he’d think, when you are liked for the work you do, but still he couldn’t make himself behave the way Götz, or maybe Meyer, did. Those revolting little creeps, what is there to talk about with them, he wouldn’t have put his hand on their heads, and look how skinny they are, and some of them with those bulging bellies, with those sunken, black-ringed eyes. Horrible. Though, interestingly, Meyer, or Götz, was not particularly convinced of Götz’s, or Meyer’s, sincerity in his expressions of concern for those kids. I have a feeling, says Meyer, or Götz, that this was all an agreement, probably with Commander Andorfer — who had already managed to come up with the rules for the non-existing camp, why shouldn’t he think up the chocolates — and once, while we were in Jajinci waiting for the unloading to finish, the two of them talked a little way off from the truck, and I saw how Commander Andorfer handed him something white, which I later saw quite clearly was a paper bag of chocolates. A brown-noser’s words if ever I heard them, wholly unbefitting an SS-Scharführer, but people are fragile, there is no human being who, sooner or later, won’t crack. Look at me: I am lying on the floor like a whipped dog, I’ve rested my head on a pile of books, I’m staring at an empty wall. I am lying, pressed down by figures, scenes from photographs, descriptions, technical details on the production of trucks, numbers, averages, names. I have a feeling I’ll be paralysed forever. I will never be able to go out again. Götz and Meyer’s warnings that only the weak of spirit fall don’t help. This is not news to me. How many times have I collapsed under heaps of notebooks containing homework assignments, and how I’d really collapse once I had finished marking! And the other day, while I was climbing up Rhigas Pheraios Street, I felt something touch me when I was standing on a corner. I don’t know if I’ll be able to describe that touch. Like the impression of a moist palm on your face. It doesn’t matter. I stood there on that corner, facing a building, convinced that one of my relatives must once have lived there. No need to look down the lists in my bag and check the address. Or perhaps it was that Götz and Meyer’s truck had passed this way, maybe that was what held me, and I imagined how one of them might draw the other’s attention to the balding man standing on the corner, gesticulating and talking to himself. At the Library of the Municipality of Belgrade, they even warned me that they’d throw me out if I didn’t stop bothering the other users with my mumbling. Götz, or Meyer, one of them, also liked to talk to himself from time to time, especially when they were driving through monotonous scenery. Meyer, or Götz, was irritated at first by the tiresome drone of the two identical voices, but later, when he got used to their noise, they started making him drowsy. He would stare out of the window, his eyes closing, and then he squinted through his lashes, and then he dropped off to sleep. He dozed like a baby, with a smile on his lips, his eyelids fluttering, his cheeks dimpling. Only a peaceful man, pleased with his life, who feels fulfilled, can sleep like that. What I’d give to be in his place! When I wake up in the morning, the sheet is wound round my throat, the duvet is on the floor, my hands are twisted up in the pillowcase. I could talk for hours of my dreams — more wrestling matches than dreams. I dreamed, for instance, how I was wandering through the labyrinth of the family tree; I was wandering for ages, my feet hurt; finally I caught sight of a way out and gladly ran towards it and found myself at the gate to the pavilion at the Fairgrounds, choked by the stench of fear and desperation; I feel nausea rising and try to hide, crouching in a corner, but no matter how I try, I can’t regurgitate anything; then in the distance I catch sight of Götz and Meyer wearing white hospital gowns; with their arms outstretched, faceless, walking towards me. Dreams like that make my face clench up. Sometimes I have to press my face with my fingers to push the wrinkles up off my forehead, stretch my eyelids. At school, in the classroom, I don’t dare look up at the students. My head bowed, poring over an open folder, I listen to them discussing novels written on subjects from World War II. As if you were living in a war, I tell them, talk about it that way, as if you were in a war now. Götz and Meyer are sitting in the last row, whispering, ripping pages out of their notebooks and folding paper aeroplanes. Later, at break, they eat hotdogs with mustard in a near-by park. Through the window of the classroom, hunched behind the curtains, I watch as bits of bread vanish into their facial voids. In twosomes like that, usually one is tall and the other short, one chubby, the other slender, but there is practically no difference between Götz and Meyer: they are the same height, of ordinary build, they wear the same-sized boots. Fine, one of them has slightly wider feet than the other, which means that his boots chafe him a little more, but a little difference like that, or so they say, only emphasises their similarity, their walk, for instance, or the way they raise their hand in greeting. Götz actually could be Meyer, and Meyer, indeed, could be Götz. Maybe they are, who knows? Both talk with equal earnestness about their Saurer, praising it with carefully chosen words, without hesitating to make certain comments, for instance: on the instability of the truck’s body when it was filled to capacity, which meant that it was essential to cut back on the number of items in each load, which had as a consequence an increased consumption of fuel, because the carbon monoxide had to fill more empty space. The smaller the body of the truck, they concluded, the greater its effect. Later, in a book, I happened upon a German report from June 1942 that discusses in almost the same words the problem of the stability of gas trucks. The author’s position, which Götz and Meyer couldn’t have known, is quoted: had they reduced its size, they would have thrown the balance of the entire truck out of kilter, and then the front axle would have had to bear an incomparably greater pressure. In practice, however, those who submitted the report claimed, the load would rush instinctively to the back door as it closed, and at the end of the trip, the greatest number of them would be right there, which meant that the weight of the load was heavily over the rear axle, thereby maintaining the necessary equilibrium. This same document is touching in its concern for the welfare of the load, which found itself in the dark in the back of the truck, screaming and banging at the door, and therefore it would be better, the document proposes, that there be a light in the truck at the very beginning when the load is being processed, which would help to reassure the load itself, and, I conclude, ensure a more equally distributed inhalation of the carbon monoxide. The author also remarks that it would be necessary to secure the light bulb with metal netting, probably so that no-one would break it and, God forbid, cut their hand or get an electric shock. Götz and Meyer would most certainly have supported such a suggestion, though they doubt that this would entirely do away with the screams and howls, because in their case, where the loading proceeded in perfect order, sooner or later, especially after they had stopped and hooked up the exhaust pipe, someone would start to shout, and the rest would join in. In the end, it never lasted very long, and soon the shouting, as their experience showed, turned into those sounds you hear when you can’t hear them any more. It is over, Götz, or Meyer, would say, the one who is definitely married. He said it every day, sometimes even twice, and Meyer, or Götz, the one who isn’t, maybe, married, would always wince. There is no mention of this in their reports, which I never saw, but I reckon that Götz and Meyer had to have written at least one report. I like to picture them bent over sheets of paper, frowning and chewing on a pencil. They turn to me: Why aren’t you helping us now? No-one can help history, the woman at the Museum says. She says this with such certainty that I don’t even try to respond. While I sit across from her, I know how my students feel. Then I got a letter from Vienna confirming how after the war there was no investigation in Germany into the case of Götz and Meyer, and that there is no way to find out what happened to them. I read the letter in front of the letter boxes. I paid no attention to the stamp. My knees shook, and I had to sit down on the stairs. I didn’t sit long, something nudged me in the back, I barely managed to grab my belongings, get in the queue behind the others, while bits of sentences were coming through from all sides, deep sighs, choked-back sobs. We climbed into the military truck, and through a hole in the tarpaulin, while we were driving, I saw how the buildings and streets passed, and then we reached the bridge, and Belgrade faded into the distance. Picture the life collected in a grain of sand, I told my students. Yesterday it was an entire world, today it is a dot. It is impossible to describe, because in doing so you’d be doing an injustice either to the world or to the dot. You can’t talk, you see, of both in the same language; one starts where the other lets off; one cannot grasp the other. This is far too convoluted for them: I see their eyebrows furrow, their lips purse. Life is history, I write on the board, and in history no-one can help anyone else. Strange, but when he arrived at the Fairgrounds camp and took the bag of chocolates out of his pocket, Götz, or Meyer, felt as if he was leaving history behind. He moved through space outside time, existing only in a present belonging to no-one. Then he’d blink, and the next moment he’d find himself behind the wheel of the Saurer, whistling a march, pleased that it is not his turn to sit in the passenger seat, to be in charge of re-attaching the exhaust pipe. Although he was not superstitious, he’d feel something evil in the air when he got out of the truck, and suddenly, while motes of dust were falling on his uniform, he heard the noise and cries coming from the back of the truck. Once he heard bees buzz, another time a bird sang, but the dull noise grew, especially once he came closer to the underside of the truck with the exhaust pipe in his hand. In one of those dreams when Meyer, or Götz, had to wake him, with threats that the next time he’d pour a glass of water down his neck, which he never did, in one of those dreams, he dreamed someone spoke his name through that little hole. Enunciated it loud and clear: Wilhelm Götz. And then said: You are Erwin Meyer. What a terrible dream, even now he cringed when he remembered it. He had never told it to anyone, although once he had barely kept himself from telling it when he was with Untersturmführer Andorfer. While they were smoking a little way off from the truck, waiting for the unloading to finish, they talked about dreams, and when Andorfer told him of his own exciting dream, something about a double-headed eagle, he wanted to tell him his, but then he bit his tongue, coughed and said he had a sore throat. Andorfer put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a bag of cough sweets. He wasn’t fond of the taste of menthol, though his love of chocolate was famous, but he accepted the offer and put the sweet on his tongue. The children at the camp took his sweets in just the same way: they put them on their tongue and then, eyes closed, pressed them up against the roofs of their mouths. There were children, especially among the youngest of them, who took the chocolates with their grimy fingers and with careful nibbles bit off all the chocolate coating. Then with their little tongues they poked around in the filling as if seeking buried treasure. It occurs to me that none of them knew what Götz’s, or Meyer’s, names were. They’d cluster around him and shout: Mister, over here, Mister! And not only the children, none of the prisoners at the camp had any idea what Götz and Meyer were really called, though it is easy to imagine that they referred to them somehow, maybe as Slim, or Whiskers, in a word, with whatever made Götz, Götz and Meyer, Meyer. They knew, I am thinking here of the prisoners, things that elude me, while I know what eludes them: I know Götz’s and Meyer’s names, and the real purpose of the Saurer, and the real meaning of the words transport and load , and the story about the fabled camp in Romania, or Poland. Although when Götz and Meyer are at issue, I must admit I do not know who is who, which makes me, in a sense, more ignorant than those who knew nothing of their names. I keep on about names, as if they mean something, but in fact, I may have already said this, they are empty shells, shed skins, except that a shell, when you put it to your ear, murmurs like the sea, while nothing can be heard from their names but silence. I can’t listen to silence any more. Not long ago, about 3.00 in the afternoon, when the rush hour is at its worst, I walked for a long time round the streets, went to the houses where my relatives used to live, and then I tried to determine which route each of them took that December morning when they went to the headquarters of the Special Police for Jews. They were bent over, lugging their bundles, dragging suitcases along the pavement, checking to see they’d locked the door and watered the plants. Someone said that he couldn’t remember when he’d got up this early, but he didn’t regret it, the morning air was so pleasant. The air around me, at that very moment, was extremely unpleasant. I walked through the streets that Götz and Meyer’s Saurer had passed through. I was on the corner where something had touched me once, but I didn’t feel anything this time. Maybe in the meanwhile, in the time between my two visits to that imagined history, my relatives had moved? I will have to check that in the lists. I refer to lists, but in fact this is a vast documentation, in countless files with headings and a variety of symbols directing you to other files with related material, which allowed me to put my hand quickly on all the documents relevant to any person or event. Every one of my relatives or, more precisely, every family had its own file, as did Commander Andorfer, the Jewish hospital, the Gestapo, the Department for Social Welfare and Social Institutions, Jajinci. Götz and Meyer, too, had their file, but in it were just copies of the telegrams announcing their arrival and departure. The instructions on their file cover direct you to the following files: Saurer — technical equipment; Saurer — application, maps; Commander Andorfer, Untersturmführer; Riga; Correspondence — Austria; Correspondence — Germany; the Fairgrounds; a file with my name on it. Götz and Meyer are mentioned here and there in these files, but altogether there was barely enough to fill a page. Their faces continued to be white splotches, resembling flags of surrender, which was altogether the wrong impression, because if there was anyone in need of hanging out that sort of flag, it was I, not Götz and Meyer. Several times I was, indeed, tempted to surrender, I was barely able to restrain myself from doing so, as I was lost in the labyrinth of the family tree or among the papers thrown on the floor of my room. I, too, have had times when I have felt like giving up, said Götz, or maybe it was Meyer, the monotony of the work was killing me, the endless repetition, one day at the wheel, the next day responsible for the exhaust pipe, and then over again, as if there was nothing else left in life. The other, Meyer, or Götz, made no effort to conceal his disagreement. Exactly, he said, this is our life as long as the task we have been assigned to exists. He had long been suspicious of his fellow officer’s genuine devotion to the ideals of the Reich. His work effort was not being questioned, there could be no doubt about it, just as there could be no question of his loyalty, but there was something too tender in him, yes, it radiated from his melancholy, along with something else he couldn’t put his finger on, but he was certain that the key to the door to the other side was right here. He couldn’t say exactly what that other side was, this was something he still had to discover, but it was enough to open all four eyes and listen to the night voices from the adjacent bed. If I had known that, Götz, or was it Meyer, the first one, told me in confidence, I would have treated him differently. There you go: you open your heart to people and they hold their noses. I hadn’t understood what he was trying to say, but I had no will to pursue it. I felt uncomfortable while I sat with them under the Sava Bridge and drank beer. The beer dulled me, the heat reached us despite the shade and the river, the pavilions at the Fairgrounds were at my back, or at the back of my neck. Here, not far from us, prisoners were carrying their dead over the ice-shackled river. They must have seemed like black dots to someone looking down at them from the Kalemegdan fortress in the centre of Belgrade. They moved so slowly, it took them so long to get across, that an observer had to take his gloves off from time to time and rub his eyes. The cold nipped at their faces, tightened the skin on their chins, gnawed at their ears. The ground slipped under them at every step, but still the prisoners had a firm hold on the corpses, as if there was something that might happen to them if the corpses fell from their hands and slid onto the ice. No-one dies twice, said Götz, or Meyer, and burped. He couldn’t know that, two years after their stay in Belgrade, the German Occupation forces decided to burn the corpses they had buried at Jajinci. So my relatives did die twice after all, once in the darkness of the back of the truck, aching for fresh air, and a second time on a heap of bodies, aching to rest in peace. As they were disinterred, a witness states, valuables were stripped from the corpses: rings, watches, chains, gold teeth. After the corpses had been burned, the ashes were sifted in case any objects of precious metal had been missed. That covered the cost, I reckon, of the disinterment, and there must have been a little extra left over. The things that were collected were sent to Berlin in the end, and Götz, or Meyer, and I kept sitting there under the bridge, drinking warm beer. I asked him whether he knew how long fish live. It suddenly occurred to me that in the Sava maybe there still is a fish alive who was swimming around under the ice at the time and saw the shadowy figures walking so carefully with their heavy loads. Götz, or Meyer, described a circle over his forehead with the neck of the beer bottle which might have meant he thought I’d gone clean out of my mind. This is not far from the truth. Anyone else in my place would have been worried, even seen a doctor, there are various places a person can go to get advice, but I keep clenching my teeth and going on as if nothing has happened. Sometimes you win when you admit defeat, but not with me. I would rather tilt at windmills, even the old and decrepit kind, the way they are now, Götz and Meyer, if they are alive. I never met them, I can only imagine them. I’m back where I began. This is what my life has turned into: stumbling, looking back, starting anew. One of those three lives I was living in parallel, maybe even a fourth. The rest continued to follow me, unchanged, and I’d wake up like Götz, or Meyer, eager to work, and go to sleep like a 13-year-old boy preparing for his Bar Mitzvah and repeating words in a language that made his throat ache. None of my relatives in the camp could be described as a 13-year-old boy, nor do I know where he came from, nor which life he belongs to. Götz and Meyer are also unable to help me. If we had remembered all those faces, they say, we’d remember nothing else. The boy kept popping up, and on one occasion, instead of my own hands, I saw his, clear as day. He was clutching a mug of milk and he was thirsty. He was in me that day, when, in a voice squeaky with excitement, I proposed to my students that we spend our next class in a hands-on demonstration. Although beside themselves at the thought that they wouldn’t have to be in school, they wanted to know what was going to happen. The boy had, in the meanwhile, faded, leaving me to respond. It was going to be about the difference between the tangible world and art, I explained, but also about the similarity between an instant of reality and a figment of the imagination. I was pretty busy for a few days. I had to find a school bus, collect money from the students, work out the route, get my thoughts together. This last item was the hardest for me, I admit. Then on the family tree, in a forgotten corner, I found a distant relative, a Matilda, who had died in 1929. I never learned anything about her, as if she was cloaked in a family secret. I couldn’t find her grave in the Jewish cemetery, even in the overgrown Ashkenazy section. Because of her I went to see the Jewish cemetery in Zemun, although none of my relatives ever lived in Zemun, with the exception, of course, of those months they spent at the Fairgrounds camp. And so, taking care that Götz and Meyer didn’t notice, I explained to myself that poor Matilda must have died in childbirth. The boy who was born then, who had been dragging the prickly Hebrew words out of my throat, came from her extra-marital affair with a man whom she never betrayed. The boy was given the name Adam, and Matilda, as if her death was not enough, was dropped into the deep well of forgetting. Her photographs were ripped up, her old school books burned, her clothing given to charitable organisations. How it happened that Adam was never entered onto the lists of Belgrade Jews, I’ll never know, but his name was not on the summonses distributed in December 1941. Despite that, and despite the advice of the aunt whose home he lived in then, Adam packed his little suitcase on the evening of December 7, before he went to bed. Along with some underwear and a warm blue jersey, he packed the white shirt and black trousers that had been set aside for his Bar Mitzvah, and two apples which he took from the cupboard in the kitchen. One of these would be filched by an unknown boy who would threaten to beat him if he cried. He didn’t cry. I told all this to the students while we drove around town on the bus. I spoke over the driver’s sound system. I held the microphone in my right hand, and I clutched my notes in my left. There was nothing in the notes I didn’t already know by heart, I just needed them there as encouragement. The faith in paper is odd, as if history is no more than a trace of ink, as if paper is more enduring than everything else. I clutched that wad of paper like a thief snatching a squash from a field, claiming that all he was trying to do was find shelter from the wind. I stood there, arms akimbo, to keep my balance as the bus rocked like a boat, which I referred to as Noah’s Ark. If there was a wind blowing, I didn’t feel it. While I was speaking, the driver hummed a melody to himself so at the moment when the boy walks with his aunt towards the truck, I had to ask him to stop. He did so, reluctantly, but he whistled a bit from time to time after that. Not all drivers are like Götz and Meyer, I have to say. They always knew when it was time for a song, for whistling, for yodelling, and it was duty first, and an order, even when expressed as a request, had to be respected. This is where it all began, I said as we got to George Washington Street where the Special Police for Jews were stationed although it might be better to say, I added, that everything ended here. And, of course, I continued, now it is clear and sunny, but you have to picture the December gloom, a chill morning, shivers that engulf the entire body. They had locked the front door for the last time, picked up their suitcases and set out. Adam stood and watched as his aunt turned the key in the lock and pressed the door handle and then, as she was leaving, straightened the skewed mat. They must have had at least an inkling, like all the rest, that they would never be back, and that they probably were setting out on the road their husbands and fathers had already taken, but they struggled with it, as you could see in the way they walked, interrupted by quick shudders, brief flights from the truth. They themselves fled, hoping that they would arrive where they were headed as someone else, that they could go back to their flowers in their pots on their windowsills while that other person kept walking towards the building housing the Special Police. Only Adam was there, heart and soul, because even if he had wanted to, he had no-one to flee to, nowhere to go back to. He held his little suitcase, ready, at last, to set out into the world. The driver whistled softly between clenched teeth. His whistling was closer to hissing, but I recognised the tune. Now I’d like to know, I said into the microphone, what would you have done in his place. Silence washed over the bus like water dumped from a basin. Even the driver turned. I waited. First a girl with long blond hair spoke. She pushed her fringe out of her eyes and said that she would take her hamster with her, that she couldn’t bear the thought of little Ćira, which must have been the hamster’s name, staying behind without her. My life without Ćira, she added, would be nothing. The rest all spoke at once. Apparently my students owned an entire zoo, and they would not leave their homes if they had to go without their dogs, cats, parakeets, canaries, turtles, rabbits, ant colonies, praying mantises. The boy with a ponytail was the one who had the praying mantises; he kept them in jars and sometimes let them fight. Even the driver piped up: he kept pigeons. I’m sorry, I said, but the instructions are clear and allow only clothing, bedding, dry food for three days, that sort of thing. Why, this is inhuman, exclaimed the blond girl. This time she didn’t brush her fringe aside, and her eyes flashed angrily behind her hair. If we keep this up, I thought, they’ll report me to the Society for Protection of Animals, but aloud I said: That is the difference I want to talk about, the fact that you keep imagining reality as if it were an artwork in which you have a choice, while in the tangible world there is no choice, you have to participate, you cannot step out of what is going on and into something else, there is nothing else except what is going on, whether you like it or not, and that means you must feel the cold taking over, and you must have at least an inkling that you will never be back, and that you will never see your pets again, and that your rooms, as you left them, will soon be entered by people for whom none of your mementos, none of those little things you fuss over, will mean anything. The blond girl began to cry. She sobbed and sniffled, and wiped her tears away with her arm. Adam, however, did not cry. He climbed up into the military truck, sat down on the wooden floor, hugged his suitcase. Around him women and other children crowded in, and in that jostling, surrounded by excited voices, he felt a certainty he had never known before. He wanted the truck to leave soon, and the ride to last long. The truck did leave soon, I told them, though the drive did not last as long as Adam hoped it would. Through a gap in the tarpaulin, Adam saw people in a queue, then the buildings began to move by faster and faster. The driver nodded, turned his key, shifted gears, pressed the accelerator. The blond girl had stopped crying. She was staring at the floor and, if I saw rightly, was chewing her lower lip. I should have given her a handkerchief, now it was too late. I spread my feet further to keep my balance, but no matter how I tried, I couldn’t stop swaying, as if I were inching along high above them on a loosely strung wire. The route we are taking, I said into the microphone, is not, of course, the route they took, but the final result is the same: after the city comes the bridge, after the slopes and cliffs stretch the plains. They say, I went on, that plains are soothing, and there is truth in that, though this holds more for those who live there than those who carry at least a hint of uneven terrain in their feet. They, like all sailors on dry ground, do not know how to walk through these peaceful expanses, and they tend to trip even when there are no obstacles to trip over. Turn round, I said when the bus got to the bridge, and look at how the city is getting further behind us and closing up at the same time, and how although it hasn’t budged from where it was, it seems to be fading. All the students turned and peered over the backs of their seats, even the driver glanced into his rear-view mirror several times. You might talk about that as a physical pain, I said, as if someone is tearing patches of skin from your body. I heard several gasps, but no-one turned back to me. They stared at Belgrade as if it would disappear any minute. Only Adam remained quiet, crouched in his corner, unmoved by the general excitement, sighs and sobs. If he felt anything, it was excitement at the prospect of a journey, he had never travelled anywhere before, with a suitcase no less, and he started thinking of the books he had read, Children of Captain Grant and In Desert and Wilderness . He had even started writing a story not long ago about a boy, a stowaway on a boat that sank somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. He got off with a few of the sailors, in a boat that had no oars, no food or water, and here he stopped, and couldn’t figure out where to take the story next. The river they were crossing, of course, didn’t much resemble an ocean, but water is water, isn’t it? Everyone agreed. Some things are simply accepted without the need for a lot of convincing. When the truck crossed over to the other shore, Adam thought of a huge city, entirely of glass, in which you could see the endless blue of the sky. The reality, of course, at the Fairgrounds was something else entirely, but no less exciting than the one the 13-year-old boy was imagining. He got up early in the morning, shivered during roll-call, tasted the watery soup, watched them carrying away the dead, and yet at certain moments he couldn’t repress the happiness he felt that he was experiencing it all. He knew that he was in the middle of the greatest adventure of his lifetime, and he did not want to miss a single part of it, although he was no different from that little boy in the boat who was dependent on the whims of the sea’s currents. Adam didn’t understand the currents that were sweeping him along, but he could sense their force, and he soon realised that there was no point in resisting. But what happened, asked a student in a checked shirt, to his prayers? I never mentioned prayers, I answered into the microphone, all I said was that he was preparing for his Bar Mitzvah, when he was to come of age in his faith. I did say that. And he really had been working at it, I think, repeated to himself the part of the Five Books of Moses that you are supposed to read in Hebrew. I do not believe I convinced the student in the checked shirt. At that age, suspicion is a constant companion. On that point, of course, Götz and Meyer were not so different from them. They trusted only Germans, anyone else might cross over and join the enemy at any moment, if they hadn’t already done so. They even cast suspicious glances at each other now and then. The enemy has been known to crop up in the most unexpected places. By this time we had arrived at the Fairgrounds. Before that, we passed a hotel and business premises entirely of glass, quite similar to those in Adam’s fantasy, and which never would have occurred, for instance, to Götz and Meyer, although they drove their truck through this area countless times. They were thinking of other things: of where they were born — a place somewhere, I assume, deep in the German or Austrian Alps — but no need to rush things, the time would come for Götz and Meyer, indeed. First I told the students about how the camp was organised, no, first we walked around in silence, I allowed them to sense the space, I prepared them for what it used to look like, and only then did I begin to tell them about how the camp was organised, the accommodations, the daily schedule, the workshops, the living and the dead. They stood huddled in a circle around me, as if they were afraid to step back at all. They had already known, of course, that they were on a journey with no return, but hope kept them from truly believing that. There can be no doubt that the greenery contributed, the dense greenery that had surrounded the Fairgrounds on all sides, so that from far away a person would be convinced he was coming to a wooded area, and once he stepped into the tangle of shadows, he might think it was a park, rather overgrown, yet still a park. So I slowly erased it all, that greenery, removed it leaf by leaf, picked up every twig, until nothing was left but the bare, decrepit buildings, standing in a void. Nothing is more awful than a void, nothing more present than absence. After all, I told them, that was how Adam felt: he was here, but actually he wasn’t, just as the camp, despite its overcrowding, consisted of an empty place in which every step echoed like the blow of a hammer on an anvil. Do you understand what I’m talking about? They didn’t. They looked at me and blinked, the way people blink when they are startled by a gust of wind or the sun bursting through the clouds, and what would they do if I were to ask to hear how their teeth chatter, their stomachs growl, their joints creak? Adam heard all those things, from other people and from himself, especially at night, when he had to bite the pillow to stop his teeth from chattering and curl up in a ball to quiet the howling of his stomach. By day, he’d double over with a nasty cramp cinching his stomach in a steel vice, but even then he kept his eyes open, because someone had to see it all and remember every humiliation, every escape into madness and flight into dreams, every bit of frostbite or bruise from being struck by the butt of a gun or kicked by boots. But why, said a girl with spectacles, when, at the end, he would, I mean, since he knew, he had to know, that after everything else the only … She didn’t finish her sentence. She couldn’t say the word die , as if she would be taking her own life by saying it. Götz and Meyer would certainly have understood her: they didn’t use the word either, instead they spoke of “moving” or “processing”, using the euphemistic German terminology in which no things are what the language usually calls them but are something else, a reality taking place within unreal coordinates. Memory, I said, is the only way to conquer death, even when the body is forced to disappear, especially then, because the body merely goes the way of all matter and spins in an endless circle of transformations, while the spirit remains in a transparent cloud of mental energy moving slowly through the world and pouring, randomly as it first may seem, into restored matter, so that no-one knows what they’ll find in themselves when they look within. I stopped talking. If I had gone on, I surely would have lost them forever. I could see in their desperate glances, in their faces, which expressed a fear of slipping, the possibility that they might stay in a world about which they knew nothing until yesterday, until that very moment. I breathed deeply. That frightened them too, as if I was leaving them no oxygen, as if I was sucking up the last bit of air from their lungs. I smiled. Now we’ll talk poetry, I said. Tell me how experience becomes a poem. For a moment their eyes flashed with the old fire, but it was already too late, they had gone out, those fires, as Adam’s memories descended from the heavenly heights and sank into their every pore. By the way, no matter how odd it may sound, while he was at the camp Adam did write poetry. Not, indeed, on paper, because that would have been a luxury for frozen fingers, but in his head, especially in the morning, in line, during roll-call, and in the evening, when the sun sank beyond the plains. They were short poems, with flawed verse schemes and failed rhymes, but they were poems, a series of images which expressed wonder at the miracle of creation and the insecurity of existence in a world in which there are no discernable shapes. You might say, I added, that those were prayers, they were so sincere and simple, so precise in expressing fervour, fear and submission. If Götz and Meyer had had a chance to hear them, perhaps they would have been transformed and given up the task they’d been entrusted with or at least approached it with a feeling of alarm. You can’t love God and act against his will at the same time. The moment I said those words, I realised how pointless it is to say such a thing, but the students believed me, I could see that in their lowered eyes, in the way their fingers were intertwined, the joints clutching so tightly that they were white. But, I said, this is a hands-on class, let’s set our speculations and spiritual questions aside, and let’s do something. I said this, in fact, more for my own sake than for theirs, just as I chastised myself when I’d get lost in guesswork standing in front of the drawing of my family tree that used to hang on the wall of my sitting room. I must say here that it is entirely possible in the case of Götz, or possibly Meyer, that God was more present than one usually thinks, because Götz, or possibly Meyer, survived the explosion of a bomb which killed at least nine soldiers from his company, thanks only, as he often said, to God’s will, somewhere on the Eastern Front. Because of that Götz, or maybe Meyer, thanked the Lord every day for his goodness, especially while they were jouncing along in the truck on their way to Jajinci, while in the same truck, in the back, Jews were screaming at their God with their last breath, asking him why he wasn’t there, why he wasn’t there yet, why he was never there? There is nothing so awful as dying in doubt, coming unravelled, without anything to lean on. I stopped talking, again. I had said too much, as always. A breeze touched our foreheads, rustled the leaves, the sky glistened like gelatin. Suddenly, the bus driver appeared from behind the barracks. His eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks creased, he must have fallen asleep leaning on his hand or the wheel. How much longer is this going to take, he grumbled, we need to leave soon. A few more minutes, I said, Götz and Meyer are on their way, they haven’t got here yet. The driver nodded, turned, scratched his rear end and disappeared around the same corner. The students stared sadly after him, as if he were taking with him their last hope of salvation, which was not far from the truth. I recited the dimensions of the special vehicle that Götz and Meyer drove, the way I’d found them in a confidential report: 5,800 millimetres long, the height of the load space 1,700 millimetres, total structural weight 1,700 kilos, able to carry a load of up to 4,500 kilos. That meant, I said, that the vehicle could take about a hundred people who weighed up to 50 kilos each, which, after three months spent at the Fairgrounds camp, was a realistic average weight per prisoner. All the students looked reprovingly at a chubby girl who wore a headband, and a blush crept across her face. That also means, I added, that many had to bend down as they got in, and that later, during the ride, and especially after the light was put out, they bumped their heads on the ceiling as they tried to get as comfortable as possible. The people driving these vehicles, I continued, went through a special training course, and often among them, which may have been the case with Götz, or Meyer, or both, there were soldiers who had come back from the front because of injuries. At first, however, despite this training, certain mistakes were made which, fortunately, did not detract from the efficiency of the work, but did attract the attention of their superiors, so in Untersturmführer Dr Becker’s report, whose inspection trip I have already mentioned, I am sure that he draws attention to the necessity of gradually increasing the level of gas, because “it has been shown”, I read from one of the sheets of paper in my bundle, “that by releasing the gas as regulated, death comes swiftly and the prisoners die half-asleep. Now you no longer see convulsed and disfigured faces on those who have been suffocated, and there is not as much vomiting and defecation as there used to be earlier, when the gas was released all at once.” Their concern for the welfare of the prisoners is touching, I must say. I’ve said it before, I am repeating myself. Although I have no reliable information, I am convinced Götz and Meyer did not make that sort of mistake. I have not managed to track down any written complaints about their work. On the contrary, one might say, though there are no such expressions in military jargon, they fulfilled their assignment with a dedicated tenderness. I stood at the centre of the ring of students. Götz and Meyer are still quite far away, but soon their truck will pull up at the gate to the camp, there, behind you. Again I dedicated myself to my bundle of papers. The tense breathing of my students and, if I am not mistaken, the occasional sob, made me feel as if I were amid a tossing ocean of air. I was both floating and sinking, like a divided being that cannot re-connect. An awkward feeling that sends chills down my spine even now. The list in my hand turned into a flapping sail. Each of you, I said, will now become someone else, each will become first the name, and then the person who bore that name. I began handing out names as if I was scattering seeds. The boys became my boy cousins, the girls my girl cousins. I gave them an age for each name, an occupation, real or imagined, sometimes hair colour, density of eyebrows. I gave myself Adam. Adam was always separate from his group, even when he was a part of it. Shorter than the others, he always stuck out above them. That was when he began to think that maybe his preparation for his Bar Mitzvah was futile, because a week at the camp felt like a whole year, so by early March he felt he was already 25, maybe a little younger, he wasn’t quite sure of his calculations, but certainly older than he really was, so the Bar Mitzvah ritual was moot. He had earned his maturity during his second week there, when he turned 15, if we use his method of calculation, when he first bent over a person who had died. More precisely, an old woman who had died. Whether or not he got closer to God at that moment is tough to say. Maybe he merely saw that the path leading to God had far more turns in it than the image he had carried within himself. Here it looked like a winding path along a sunny slope, not very steep, so that climbing up would require almost no effort. All that changed when he bent over the old, dead woman, when it took so much effort to straighten up that his thighs wobbled and his knees buckled. In an ancient book it is written, I said, that sometimes you have to lean way down in order to see the face of the Lord. And now picture, each of you in your own mind, I went on, the faces of the people whose names you’ve been given. And not only their names, imagine them as whole people, their every move, every part of their body, each of you be the person, feel how that person’s muscles tense and their lungs fill, dream their dreams, okay, no-one was dreaming there, so instead just look, look with their eyes, and wait in a way you have never waited. Götz and Meyer would probably have been confused by such volubility, hardly surprising if you keep in mind the conciseness of military language and its resistance to gushing feeling. The students were also confused: what sort of waiting did I have in mind? Waiting, I said, for something to happen which would finally make some sense, because it was simply not possible that all this could be happening without making any sense. Then the waiting, I said, took the shape of a rumour about being transferred to a camp in Romania or maybe Poland, to a safer place, somewhere settled, the story had it, with other Jews and far enough from that city on the other shore, which was closing its eyes shamelessly to the scenes of their precipitous fall. While all this was going on, Götz and Meyer were receiving instructions for their special assignment, then they devoted themselves to checking even the most minute technical details of their Saurer’s special equipment. All that was left was to depart, which they soon did, heading towards people who, though at first glance seemingly motionless, were actually hurtling towards the two of them, waiting for them on precisely the spot where we are now standing. Then I began a roll-call, to turn them into little family groups, to arrange them in a column, and, though a little disorderly, they marched with even steps to the gate to the Fairgrounds camp. The bus was waiting, bathed in sunlight. The driver was asleep, resting his cheek on his arms folded over the steering wheel. As I called their names and as they got onto the bus, I told them they should imagine how the person whose name they carried entered the grey truck, whose dimensions I had repeated several times and which was driven by Götz and Meyer. You can’t see them now, I said, but take my word for it, they were refined gentlemen. Götz, or maybe Meyer, one of them, wouldn’t, as people often say, harm a fly, but he was capable of tossing a cat from the roof down into the concrete yard. Cats are stupid, he said, I would never like to be a cat. No-one laughed. Adam turned and glared at me. I started to say the names, the bus filled slowly, the driver woke up, smacked his lips and immediately began to whistle, the students’ faces were grim, anxious, they were all silent, although the mothers touched the children, the husbands leaned over their wives, but all in silence, as if under water or at a very high altitude, in rarified mountain air. Wherever it was, I found myself among my relatives, and I have no words to describe the sweetness I felt, that same way I felt when I hung the drawing of the family tree on the wall for the first time. Later I took it down, but now I am no longer certain where it is, on the wall or in a file. Perhaps that doesn’t really matter. More important is what happened with Adam when he saw the grey truck. That same moment he began to understand the language spoken by Commander Andorfer and the other soldiers, suddenly he could see that there were parallel worlds, that the worlds were created by language, and that it was enough to alter the meaning of several words in order to change the existing world into a new one. And he saw precisely where that new camp was, the one about which Commander Andorfer had informed the members of the Administration did, indeed, exist, and what route one had to take to get there. He didn’t know precisely what went on inside the grey truck, because he was not familiar with how an automobile engine works. He had never been interested in such things. Then one night he dreamed that from the dense darkness, faces of people who were asphyxiating flew out before him. He opened his eyes and stared at the pale darkness of the great hall, filled with all the possible sounds the human body can produce. So it was that he was awake and saw the moment when the hall would be empty, and he almost fainted at the deafening silence. But before that, I said into the microphone, we must see, no, we can’t see, because the people whose names you carry were in the dark, we must feel what they felt, packed into the Saurer, driven by Götz and Meyer. At first there wasn’t much, I mean, they felt almost nothing, they just groped in the dark for their nearest of kin, and they spoke, they all spoke at the same time, so that Adam, although far from them, heard quite clearly how the spoken words were smashing and shattering. The truck stopped two or three times, but it started up again soon, and then someone recognised by the sound that they were crossing the bridge. They were going back, at last, to Belgrade. Then just when they began to try and guess which streets they were driving along, the truck stopped. The people whose names you bear fell silent, I said, and then they listened tensely in the dark. They heard voices, recognised German, but none of them understood the words, then the door slammed, someone walked along the truck, went back, stood, you heard some sort of rattling on the floor, and as if that had been some predetermined signal, everyone began to speak at once, to shout and bang the sides of the truck, until the door to the cab slammed again and the engine started up. Adam claimed that at that point you could hear birds, but I don’t know whether he can be believed. The truck, apparently, was driving through town, and it would have to go quite far before they would be anywhere near a wood with birds. Götz and Meyer also don’t remember any birds, though sometimes, if I am not mistaken, they told it differently. Whatever the case, soon after that second start, the people whose names you bear began to notice the smell of fuel exhaust. At first it was pleasant, like some secret bond with the outside world, and then more and more repellent, but sweetish, followed by nausea, a powerful headache, choking, hoarse screams, although there were those who lowered their heads and fell asleep. I touched my lips to the net on the microphone and looked at the students. Most of them were straining to breathe, one girl had clutched her throat, someone’s hand struggled feebly towards the window and then slid helplessly back, one boy covered his eyes with his hands, two girls had their arms round each other, their heads on one another’s shoulders, I saw some lips moving, but except for the driver’s soft whistling I heard no sounds. If we keep this up, Adam thought, all of us are going to die. He went over to the carpenter’s workshop and asked if they had anything he could use to poke holes in an aluminium partition. How thick? asked the carpenter. Adam showed a thickness between his index finger and his thumb: This thick, he said. You are not big enough to manage a drill, answered the carpenter, but you could handle a spike and bang it through with a hammer. A spike, a drill, a rasp, it didn’t matter, the carpenter was right, Adam wasn’t up to handling tools, he wouldn’t be able to use them, with the best of will he couldn’t have done because Adam was weak, he had no strength in his arms, no force to his swing. He had to come up with something else. But what was happening to you, I asked, here? No-one answered. One student’s tongue protruded from his lips. Most of them were sitting, eyes closed, though there were some who were staring, motionless, but all of them had faces twisted, convulsed, in revulsion or pain. We can only guess, I said, what they felt as their knees gradually gave way, as they slipped to the floor, pressed down by the other bodies, pushed by hands which were clutching at whatever they touched, some were still shouting, showing not the slightest inclination to let up, and then suddenly the dark began to disperse, and in that bright light they could no longer see anything. I put down the microphone and went down the aisle. I opened several windows, patted the young man on the cheek whose tongue was protruding from his lips, pulled back the curtain the dark-haired girl had used to hide her face. Using the route we are using now, I said, or one very much like it, but certainly in Götz and Meyer’s truck, about five thousand people passed right through the centre of town over the next few weeks. Their names were different, but they were always the same people, just as they were this time. Boringly similar, Götz, or Meyer, on whom Belgrade hadn’t left much of an impression, would have said. Götz, or was it Meyer, did enjoy a lovely sunset one evening while he was strolling about the Kalemegdan fortress, though later on, when he thought back, he associated that image with a place in Ukraine where another river flowed, and there was a camp there, too, and all in all, a soldier’s life is monotonous, no two ways about it, it is possible to make a mistake, no-one loses or gains anything. I stopped talking and sat down in the last, empty row. I admit I no longer knew what to say. The bus drove through Karadjordje Park and descended towards the Autokomanda part of town. It was somewhere here, I said, that this same kind of silence reigned in that grey truck. The only people speaking were Götz and Meyer, but they were up in the cab, debating about a black cat because of which Götz, or maybe Meyer, the one who was driving, had to brake. Though maybe, since traffic was not as bad then as it is now, maybe the souls were still parting from the limp bodies and rising towards the corner, where they were awaited by the shining of the other souls, the light that the dying had discerned in the dark. Although the carbon monoxide could no longer hurt them, they still breathed a sigh of relief when they reached the end of their trip, in Jajinci, and through the open door wafted out into the fresh air, up to the heights. The souls couldn’t know that this was Jajinci, I said, just as you don’t know that, the place doesn’t exist for you, it exists only for me, and it existed, of course, for Götz and Meyer, although they tried to speak of it as seldom as possible, because they could never pronounce it correctly. In their jargon, Jajinci was “that place”. For example: We are driving a load to “that place” again. Meanwhile Adam has been frantically trying to catch up with time. He was certain poison was being introduced into the truck. He couldn’t figure out how, but those faces from his dream convinced him he wasn’t mistaken. Everything is true, even what we dream. No, I said, Adam didn’t know this was Jajinci, haven’t I explained that already? I got up again and walked to the front of the bus. The driver was whistling pretty loudly now, mumbling two or three words now and then, something like a refrain. I picked up the microphone, coughed, and then I turned, faced the students who had sunk into other people’s bodies. I spoke to them like a hypnotist who has to wake his audience. He walks among the rows before that moment, removing what he wants from their pockets and their hearts, convinced all the while that they are somewhere, in other worlds from which they will return borne by rapture, unable to notice immediately what has been taken. But what happens, I find myself wondering, if the hypnotist makes a mistake somewhere, those worlds are easy to create but difficult to sustain, and it would be easy for there to be collisions, overlap, balancing of coordinates, and what if, halfway through, so to speak, someone wanders from one and crosses over to another? I mean if the hypnotist says something and claps his hands, which world will the people who have been hypnotised wake up in? I would like your attention, I said. I did not clap my hands, but they all listened: they moved their dulled, and then clearer and clearer, eyes in my direction, they straightened up in their seats, smoothed their hair, moistened their lips. Over the next fifty days, I said, Götz and Meyer’s truck travelled this same route once, or sometimes twice, a day, except Sundays. Sunday is the day of rest. Every Sunday Götz and Meyer went for a walk, played cards, drank beer. Every Monday, however, they arrived promptly at the gate to the camp, tidy, shaved, they didn’t even have bloodshot eyes. Unlike Adam’s bloodshot eyes, a consequence, he reckoned, of his sleepless nights spent concocting a plan to master whatever it was that was suffocating the people in the back of the grey truck. By this time we had got to Jajinci, and here, without allowing them a chance to even breathe in the fresh air, started the long story about how the work was organised, how they dug the graves and buried the corpses, I mentioned the five Serbian prisoners, of whom there may have been seven, and then skipped forward two years and talked about how they burned the corpses on this very same site, about sifting through the ashes for valuables, and how, according to witness statements, the ash was dumped into the Sava River somewhere on Čukarica, where fishermen later found coins, belt buckles, buttons, wallets, metal lapel pins. I couldn’t stop, despite the pleading looks of my students and their sickened grimaces. Then the driver said it was high time for us to be getting back. But we mustn’t forget Adam, who had finally worked out that what he had been thinking about so much was close at hand. Naturally: a gas mask. Easy to think of, impossible to do, another way of saying the same thing. But if there can be such a place as this camp, Adam wondered, then why shouldn’t everything be possible, and why shouldn’t it be possible that there might be a boy at the camp who finds a way to get hold of one simple gas mask? The first reality is already so unreal that nothing within it seems unreal any more, Adam might have thought, but instead, he immediately latched onto the practical details, trying to answer the questions: “where” and “when”, because everything depended on them, especially that slender thread which keeps life going, and to which every “why” is a weight that threatens to interrupt it. In short: he remembered that at the camp headquarters building, where he sometimes went to do one little job or another, right by the entrance, on a shelf, he had spotted several gas masks, left there, as far as he could tell, for the officers working in that place. All he had to do was find the right moment, a time when he could grab one of them, and the best time seemed when a new transport was being prepared, and when most of the officers and soldiers were busy keeping order. So it was. Don’t ask me how it happened, perhaps Adam was invisible that day, but while the women and children were climbing up into the grey truck, Adam strode, the gas mask under his shirt, towards a secret place where he would hide the mask until the day when his turn came. I know this is going on too long, but there are some things you can’t describe differently. I hope that the driver will understand, I said, and all of them, as if by command, looked at the driver, who first turned round, as if there was someone standing behind him, and then shrugged helplessly. And so it was, when the moment came, that Adam tucked the gas mask under his shirt, put on his thick sweater and winter coat, hunched over to cover the bulge over his stomach, and took his little suitcase to the other truck, the one that came into the camp, and then went over to the gate, where they were gathering the group set for transport. Not far from them, one of the drivers was giving the children sweets. Which means, I said, that now we can go back to the bus. Adam was among the first to get on and made his way to the furthest corner. He looked around but could hardly see a thing, because the truck quickly filled with people who were pushing and pressing against each other, trying to find as comfortable a spot as possible for the long journey. Then the door began to close, and most of them turned towards it, which meant that Adam had a little more room, using it to slip out of his coat. In the meantime, people were calling to each other in the dark, women were summoning their children, children were crying, someone cursed angrily, a voice, suddenly and clearly, said: What matters is that we’re leaving, and everyone fell silent. Adam sniffed carefully, but all he could sense were the smells of human bodies. Maybe there is no poison, he thought, maybe they will just drive us around until we suffocate from lack of air. But all his doubts were dispersed when the truck stopped altogether, the engine died, and everything got quiet, and you could hear someone’s footsteps, then a rattling that seemed to come through under their feet. Adam unbuttoned his shirt. Who knows how, in the dark, when the truck started up again and you could smell the petrol in the air, he managed with all the bands and buckles, but he pulled the mask over his face, and after two or three trial breaths, he started breathing evenly. Everything that followed he already knew from his dream, but still, despite the dark, he closed his eyes. He opened them only when all sound had died away in the truck, and he clearly heard someone in the cab repeat, in German: Es ist aus, es ist aus . He tried to push away the body pressing against his legs, but it kept coming back and got heavier and heavier, so that in the end, when the truck stopped and the door started opening, he barely managed to manoeuvre out of his corner. The door had swung open by then, light was streaming into the smoke-filled truck, and Adam saw how the tangled heap of people was moving as if alive, and at the same time, stumbling, as if hurtling towards the source of light. Then this subsided, you could hear voices outside, and Adam slowly followed the smoke that was spilling out of the truck. He made his way with difficulty, climbing over the heaped-up bodies. When he peeked out, first he saw the sky, then greenery and excavated earth, all of it through a haze, and then he met the gaze of a man in a white shirt. Adam raised his hand to wipe the glass on the mask, and the man stumbled, fell to his knees and began to cross himself. It took Adam a little time to fiddle with the bands and buckles, then he slid down the tangled bodies closer to the door, and here he proceeded to remove the mask. Somehow this part was harder than putting it on, so that he didn’t even notice when the man in the white shirt was approached by a German soldier who smacked him on the back with his rifle butt. When Adam finally saw the soldier, he was raising his gun towards Adam, and Adam realised he could see him quite clearly, no trace of fog, he could even see the fine lines around the man’s eyes, squinting a little in the sun. How interesting, thought Adam, who was a curious boy, how does the bullet propel from the barrel? Then, slowly, the soldier’s trigger finger whitened with pressure. Adam didn’t hear the shot, but Commander Andorfer who, with Scharführer Götz, or possibly Meyer, was having a cigarette across the field, heard it. What was that? Commander Andorfer asked, his right hand in his pocket. Sounds as if someone fired a shot. He dipped his hand into the pocket, pulled out the little bag of cough sweets and offered them to the Scharführer. They listened, listened, but heard nothing. During that time Adam was falling. He fell slowly, bit by bit, as if crumbling, as if, he thought, he’d never fall all the way, but once he was almost to the ground, he felt how he suddenly pulled free of himself and rose slowly, straight up, skywards, until the people on the ground were tiny ants. So, said the driver, should we go back to the school? If I hadn’t been holding the microphone, I would have fallen, his voice shocked me so. I did muster the strength to say yes, and I caught sight of a little flicker in the glassy eyes of my students. For homework, I said, and the flicker was instantly snuffed out, write a composition on the theme: “Today I Am Someone Else”. I put the microphone back in its place, turned off the sound system. Adam was dead. I’d thought, I’d hoped he would survive. I could have lain down between the bus seats and fallen asleep instantly, I was so drained. It isn’t easy to show someone that the world, like a sock, has its other side, and that all you need is one skilful twist to switch one side to the other, skilful and quick, so that no-one notices the change, but everyone accepts that the wrong side is in fact the right side of the world. The bus stopped and the students rushed off, mumbling their good-byes. The driver took out the papers I had to sign, and for a moment, while I scribbled the letters that comprised my name, I thought of asking him how he had understood the story about the inside-out world, but then I noticed his lips, pursed, ready to whistle, and I gave up. There was something in that mouth that reminded me of Götz’s and Meyer’s lips, though I’d never seen them and could only imagine them, but I really did imagine them that way, at least in part, at least at the moment when Götz, or Meyer, raised his razor and started shaving. In all this the lips have no meaning whatsoever, I don’t know why I mention them. When I got off the bus, three of the girls from the class came over. They all three spoke at once, and, as far as I could gather, they wanted to know whether I truly believe that people have souls. I do believe that, I said. But Adam, the highest treble among the girls asked, was he greeted, I mean was his soul met by someone up there? We stared up at the sky for a moment. Of course, I said, they were all up there, a whole throng of golden souls hovering nearby, he could feel how all the pain poured from him and vanished into the endless blue. Yes, yes, yes, they said, again all three of them with one breath, obviously impatient, but in that case, they immediately wanted to know, if souls already exist, can they be lost? Of course they can, I said, although a soul that remembers can never be lost. Don’t all souls remember, they asked, surprised. Some of them don’t, I said, some try to forget. Yes, yes, yes, they said, thanked me, turned away and left. That was all I needed: a riddle at the end of a day full of dying. Today I had already been Adam, Commander Andorfer, Götz and Meyer, the Serbian prisoner and the German soldier, I could not also be an interpreter of human souls, regardless of the fact that I speak of them as if I meet them daily. I have never seen a soul, and I can only imagine one, just as I picture Götz and Meyer, whom I have also never seen. I did, indeed, one night, starting suddenly from a dream, catch sight beneath the ceiling of a small, silvery body, round and completely transparent, and when I blinked, it vanished. Now I am prepared to believe that that was a soul, perhaps not mine, but nevertheless a soul, although at the time I convinced myself that it was the afterglow of the headlights from a car that had rushed by in the road. In short, the talk of the soul reminded me that I had recently, maybe two weeks before, contemplated suicide. It was a moment when I asked myself for the umpteenth time, as I leafed through documents from the file of witness statements, what I would have done had I been at the camp and understood at one point, as the prisoners surely must ultimately have understood, that the transports in the grey truck were not the beginning of a journey to the promised camp, in Romania or Poland, but rather that in there, in the truck, hid the beginning and end of every journey — would I have waited obediently, even then, for the inevitable spin of the wheel of fate, or would I have sought some way to circumvent it? It was evening, I was already exhausted, and something else was demanding my attention, so that only later, as I was brushing my teeth, did it occur to me: I’d kill myself. Once that idea had nudged my consciousness, I could no longer shake it off. I lay there in bed, in the dark, breathing deeply and waiting for my heart to stop pounding. My resolve shocked me, there is no point in pretending it didn’t, despite the fact that it was expressed in the conditional tense. It didn’t take me long to get from there to the present time, not, of course, grammatical, but real, time, the one enveloping us. Here I should mention that I had earlier thought of suicide as an act of cowardice and was truly surprised by my readiness to see in it something else, for instance: the right to the choice of one’s last minute in life. I was drawn to the possibility of interpreting that as a symbolic liberation from Götz and Meyer, a statement of my superiority and their defeat. Taking everything into consideration, the most natural way to do it, if you can say such a thing of suicide, would be ending my life in a car. All I had to do was find an empty place, attach the exhaust pipe to a rubber hose and run the other end into the car, turn on the engine, close my eyes and wait. I ignored the fact that I had no car and did not know how to drive, but for that reason I spent a great deal of time debating the music for my funeral: first I thought of Mozart, anything of Mozart’s, I’d always enjoyed his lightness, then I remembered Villa-Lobos and his compositions for the guitar, and finally I decided I would be more radical, but I couldn’t make up my mind between Stockhausen and Cage. I don’t know whether all people contemplating suicide are so finicky, but a long time spent going through my records convinced me that I had been mistaken and that I’d never have the strength to turn against myself, not the courage or the cowardice, not in a camp or outside it, rather I’d wait, like most people, for fate to come for me. I hesitated regarding Götz and Meyer, and real death seemed too high a price for a symbolic victory. So the rubber tube, which I had bought, just in case, in the market, is still in the bathroom, next to the tub. There, everything comes down to the same choice between victory and defeat. There is no middle road. If I had been in my flat at that moment, I wouldn’t have missed the chance to write that on a piece of paper and put it in the file with my name on it: there is no middle road. Aside from memory, of course, as I explained to my students: a soul that remembers cannot be lost. I know that I have already said that and that I’m repeating myself, but it is not my fault that life is built on repetitions and that its movement, which resembles a straight line, actually goes round in circles. We areЧитать дальше