At the bottom of the stairs, another photo mural shows clothing spilling out of a two-storey warehouse door. Climb the stairs and, at the top, turn left and enter the room there. The clothes you brought with you are in your suitcase back in the hotel in Kraków. Overwhelming the bank of suitcases you find before you now, the whole long length of the room a slope of battered brown leather stopped by glass. Whereas downstairs, looking at the brushes, you were seized by the horrific made obvious—that each brush represented the person who had brought it—here you find, lettered in white, who that person was and where he or she was from: Herman Pasternak, Marie Kafka, Liese Morgenstern, Jnese Meyer, Denis Gelbkopf, Irene Hahn from Prague, Köln, Westerbork, Paris . . .
How long you have been standing here you don’t know, but now a tour group begins filing in. Leave, slip past and cross the hall to the other room.
A narrow aisle runs between two enormous cases. The contents of the cases declining precipitously from the ceiling, the effect is that of being trapped in an avalanche on both sides, of shoes tumbling down to bury you alive. You feel as if you are burrowing along through them as you go, and heightening the claustrophobic panic is the German tour, still leaving as the tour in Hebrew crowds in. Pressed together like this, almost up against the shoes, everyone instantly smells everyone else and wants to bolt. Stop and wait for the others to clear out and when a man elbows you trying to get past, ignore him. But isn’t he a bastard? He elbows you again, deliberately, it seems. You turn to face him. He points the outlandish horns of his eyebrows at you. Fuck off, you think, shaking with anger.
Fuck off, Kraut.
Turn back to the case. Slippers, clogs, sandals, brogues, work boots, overshoes, dancing shoes, every kind of sole, heel, strap, lace, all sizes from an infant’s bootee to the galoshes of a giant. Breathing hard now, you fog the glass, then something stops your breath. The shoes were once all colours—here a red slipper, there a white Cuban heel—but only just. Most are now a near-uniform lustreless brown. Gradually, they have blended together into a mass, indistinuishable and, again, impersonal. They are becoming, once again, abstract. The shoes are fading as memory is fading, melding as they disintegrate. And the names on the suitcases in the next room grow fainter year by year, and the suitcases themselves are almost the same dull brown as the shoes, and the brands on the shoe-polish tins have been effaced completely, the eyeglass frames rusted black, lenses fragile shards or crushed to powder, and on the handles of the brushes steadily losing bristles, only flecks of paint remain. What preservation is acceptable here, where altering anything amounts to tampering with evidence? How to put ourselves into these shoes, when these shoes no longer exist?
Shuffle forward now with the disconsolate rest, out of the shoeslide, sweating. As you descend the stairs, your sweat cools and, all at once, you feel the cold. Colder stepping out into the wind, onto the avenue of flailing trees. Pause and, with unsteady hands, take the guide from your pocket once more to read about Block 4. It is the first block on the official tour. It is your last. Afterwards, you will intercept the others en route to the crematorium.
As you enter, you immediately put your hand over your mouth and nose. A small group stands before a map of Europe that shows the asterisk of rail lines converging here, but they are all breathing normally. So, too, is the couple staring at the urn of human ash behind the glass. You, you are almost choking on the odour.
Stepping into the hall, you nearly collide with the Canadian woman, who is carrying a sorry white flower upside down. The uncle is not with her and from the anxious way she peers into the room beyond you, you guess she’s looking for him. She crosses the hall, then turns suddenly.
‘Do you speak English?’ she asks.
Tell her yes. For a moment she just stands there, as if she can’t decide what it is she wants to ask. At last she blurts it. ‘What’s that awful smell?’
Tell her you think it’s probably naphthene, ‘Or some kind of preservative—’ but stop because she doesn’t seem to know what is upstairs.
Dazedly, she turns and heads back down the corridor. Watching her go, it occurs to you that, rightly, you should have told her it was the smell of hate.
As Alison approached the gate, she was still clutching white-knuckled to her hair. Finally letting go, her fingers uncurled with stiff reluctance. ‘But you hear about it all the time,’ she said.
Malcolm insisted it wasn’t so. What actually happens, he said, is the hair falls out in patches as a result of stress or trauma. White hair, hair that has lost its pigment, is coarser, its roots more resilient, so it holds. When the pigmented hair suddenly goes, it gives the impression of colour draining overnight.
‘Oh,’ said Alison. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Don’t they teach you anything at hairdressing school any more?’
How to wash, to hold the scissors, to cut, colour, curl. To keep the armpits dry, the breath fresh. To smile always. Seeing the wind in the tree before the gate, she was reminded of something they didn’t teach: that hair has its own capacity for expression. In terror, it rises on the nape and limbs. It falls out in grief or sorrow, or is torn out. Dishevelment is a sure sign of insanity. The tree looked insane. Walking slowly, Alison and Malcolm together, they passed right under the tossing branches and the familiar wrought-work maxim.
She had not expected the deep red of the brick, or that every leaf would be a chlorophyll flag; the photographs had all been in black and white. And the trees in the photographs were fifty years smaller, but they have flourished. Here, she thought, if anywhere, the trees ought to look like they were dying.
They turned away from the crowds, walked to the end of an avenue where they came to a double perimeter fence, cement posts studded with insulators through which ran sharp knotted wires.
VORSICHT!
They passed through the opening, walking on until they came to a set of steps up to a gravel platform where a wooden gallows stood. Just beyond, a tall chimney rose out of a bank of grass. A door in the side of the bank; they entered.
With the only light coming from two mesh-covered windows across the long room, it took a moment for her eyes to adjust, standing as they were, blind, in the peculiar grave-like silence under the hill of earth. Then from the darkness, dark emerged—walls and ceiling black with human soot. Here were the ovens, the charred brick boxes in a row. Black iron doors, the arched one for the body and the smaller one below for the ash. The trolleys for the bodies were strewn with flowers. There were flowers in the ovens. It looked like a place for incinerating flowers.
They came out on the undisguised concrete side of the building, the grass slope stayed by a low stone wall. Malcolm let go of her arm and sank down with his fingers to his eyes.
‘I’ve got aspirin,’ said Alison, rummaging through her bag. When she passed him the little bottle, he shook out four tablets, popped them in his mouth and chewed until a white froth formed around his lips.
Two people came out of the crematorium. Malcolm waited for them to pass, then made to stand, but couldn’t.
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Let’s wait a bit.’
Stabbing at his eyes again, he was breathing hard and the wind, ruffling his hair, showed the grey roots untreated by the flat black rinse.
‘I’m sorry I asked you to come,’ she said.
‘It’s just the irony of it.’
He hoped she hadn’t passed his door yesterday and heard the boy in there with him.
He had not thought the boy would allow himself to be kissed, not the way Malcolm smelled; he had thought the boy would push him away. Waldemar had, of course, his own very potent odour, but it was the smell of sweat and sex—of life—while Malcolm smelled of death. Commerce before scruples. The boy was a hustler, after all. Lifting his face to Malcolm, he had puckered wetly. Malcolm, leaning over him, recalled that the last lips he had kissed were Christian’s.
But he would not do what Malcolm asked. He had had nothing but contempt for Malcolm’s suggestion: that they lie down in each other’s arms and, while Malcolm muttered endearments in French, fall asleep.
‘They tell me I should pick up my life where it left off.’ Malcolm told the girl now. ‘But I no longer have a life, you see.’ He flinched to say it here, sitting outside the Auschwitz crematorium.
Alison waited, saying nothing. Finally, he nodded and, standing, took her arm again. They walked around the green hill of the crematorium, back the way they had come. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen—the numbers on the blocks. They intersected with the stream of visitors, and, turning, continued in the direction everyone was being blown.
Malcolm, patting her hand, asked, ‘What are you most afraid of?’
She answered right away, ‘Being the same when we leave. What about you?’
He was most afraid of what had happened to Denis, afraid that if it happened to him, he would spout the same vile things. Everyone had a little Auschwitz inside. He was afraid that was what he believed.
The girl was looking at him, expecting him to speak. What he said was, ‘Being alone.’ And that he wanted to go in first.
‘Of course,’ she told him. ‘I’ll wait a few minutes.’
At the other end of the avenue, the crowd was passing through the gate in slow-moving waves, like a procession of wounded and sick. But as they neared, then passed, Alison saw that most of them were fit. They climbed the steps to Block 4, only to balk in the doorway before entering. She waited, watching long enough to see the whole cycle: coming through the gate, staggering along the blowing avenue, entering Block 4, then leaving. She was anxious to see how they were different.
When she finally crossed the avenue and mounted the steps herself, the first thing she saw was that they weren’t hesitating to enter, but stopping to read a sign in white on black. ‘The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again.’
No, they were recoiling. There was a terrible smell in the room.
She hurried through, but the smell was in the next room, too, where she found a number of glass-topped wooden cases. They contained handwritten record books, plain, leather-bound with ruled pages. They looked exactly like the appointment book at Vitae. She could even read the dates and names and addresses—09.10.41 Pinette, Daniel, Paris 2, rue Richelie, 59—just as if he’d come in for a cut.
He got that cut. Before her, another tableau, heads crudely scraped raw with a razor. Unlike the gypsy tableau back in the cinema foyer, what struck Alison now was how generic people seemed when they were shorn. She would have thought the opposite, that the features would become more prominent on the face. But no: unframed by hair, they seemed to recede. It was as if their personalities had been left in hanks on the shearing-room floor.
She began to look for Malcolm, but couldn’t find him anywhere. Almost colliding with another person in a doorway, she realized she was wandering in and out of the same rooms, and the smell was sticking in the back of her throat where she could taste it. The man in the doorway had ridden with them on the bus. Had he seen Malcolm, she was about to ask when she remembered that he wouldn’t know who Malcolm was. Momentarily flustered, she asked instead what the odour was.
He started to explain, but fell silent and glanced up. At the ceiling. Upstairs.
Malcolm was upstairs.
Stairs worn like the medieval stairs in the Mariacki Church. She turned on the landing, started up the second flight, climbing with one hand gripping the banister, the other the flower. The smell was coming from the room at the top, she discovered as she entered it. At first she didn’t see Malcolm, yet she knew he was there. She knew, because this was where the hair went.
The room was perhaps fifteen metres long. One third of the width and the whole length was taken up by a glass case, the whole case filled with hair, the whole room filled with the sickening smell of the hair. They had packed it into twenty-kilogram bales and sold it to make thread and mattress stuffing, fuses for bombs, tailor’s lining, felt insulators for army boots. That was what she’d read. That the average human head held approximately one hundred and twenty thousand hairs.
And this was where it went.
Standing in the doorway, she was thinking that somewhere tangled there was Mrs. Soloff’s hair. Mrs. Soloff’s hair and, somehow, Christian’s, too. She came forward, numbly, until she was near enough to lay the flower on the sill. This close, she saw that the hair behind the glass was actually nothing like what she had been sweeping off the salon floor. Balled up, matted, like sheared dreadlocks or dull brown fleece, it was so mixed and faded that there were no more gilt strands, no blond hanks. There were no shades of auburn or aubergine, chestnut or silver. They had come just in time, come before it was too late. The hair was like something under the bed and as fragile. Hair is dead and this was the dead hair of the dead. It was the dead and the dying, becoming dust.
6
At the hotel, Malcolm told her to leave him. ‘No,’ said Alison. ‘Let me help you in.’
They climbed the staircase together, but when they reached his room, he wouldn’t give her the key. Neither could he get it in the lock. She simply took it, and for the first time opened the door effortlessly. She helped him across the room to the bed, poured him a drink from the vodka bottle on the table.
His room looked out over the Planty, gloomy now in the concentrating dusk. When she turned from the window, he had already emptied the glass and was trying to get up.
‘Let me help you take off your coat.’
‘No.’ He pushed away her hand. ‘Please go.’
She stepped back, hesitating, not sure if she wanted to stay for his sake or hers. She didn’t want to be alone. Closing the door behind her, she went downstairs.
In the lobby, the desk clerk looked up as she passed. ‘Did you have a nice day?’
Szpitalna Street was empty, but as she neared the corner a few people were meandering in the direction of the square. In Florianska Street there were queues outside the pizza joints and a crowd had formed around a pair of busking gypsies. Their music competed with Metallica blaring from the stand selling pirated cassettes. Loitering and commerce. Life was going on, she marvelled.
She ended up back at the Mariacki Church, lit from within now, stained glass luminescing across the high dark wall, as if the church were a heavy lantern with the wick turned low. Down the worn steps she went, entering next to the chapel of the black-faced Madonna. Though night, it was much easier to see than yesterday when the little votive tongues of flame were the only illumination. Now the electricity was on, and in the part of the church around the high altar the lights were blazing. Someone was singing there, where it was brightest.
She made her way between the pews, walked up the aisle, stopping when she came to the crucifix. Light caught on the bronze relief and flared. Something she hadn’t noticed yesterday: the wound below his ribs was rimmed with pearls, the deep red centre like an eye staring out. Do they see us? she wondered. Do the dead see us?
A priest was singing in the chapel, which was half full of worshippers. Now she could see the altar, even from the last pew where she took a seat. It was not what she had expected, this famous altar. She had thought it would be a kind of table, but it was instead a huge dark wood cabinet with panelled doors. Standing on top were near life-sized figures: two bearded men crowning a kneeling woman; boyish musicians; saints in parabolic hats. Carved into the door panels were more images of suffering.
The man in the pew ahead of her suddenly turned and extended his hand to her. For a second Alison only stared at it, then she saw that this was a mass, that this was how a mass ended; all around her, people were shaking hands. Hot, his when she took it. He said something in Polish and laughed. Somehow she understood what he was telling her—cold hands, warm heart.
The priest came down into the aisle to cha
t. His brocaded robe and linen vestment rounded him out and the way he rocked on his toes as he talked, he looked like a toy punching bag. The man in front of Alison called out a question and the priest, pointing at the altar, gave an answer that prompted a spontaneous burst of laughter from them all. He left, but no one else did and soon a dour little nun appeared, beetling up the aisle in her black garment. Pausing to genuflect, she climbed the steps to the altar, disappearing a moment behind it before coming out again with a long hooked rod.
Not a cabinet. It was a book. She hooked the base of the dark wood covers—one, then the other—and swung them open.
Everyone gasped.
Dazzling, the gilt and colour. Alison put a hand over her heart.
If the beginning was carved on the outside in the near-black wood, and the middle on the two carved and vibrantly painted inside covers, then the ending was the entire huge central panel: a woman falling to her knees, surrounded by men. She was the size of a living woman, the crowd around her life-size, too. Life-size and seemingly alive—Alison saw veins pulsing in legs, throbbing arthritic knuckles, pouching skin. One man held the woman as she sank; one, fingers twined together, made a strange, unreadable gesture over her head. Another recoiled, two stared, one staggered. Above, angels winged like birds. The painted middle scenes on the doors were of angelic visitations, docile livestock, gifts being given, a radiance in the sky. But the beginning, in the dark wood on the outside panels, was a taunting and a flaying, a ghastly drawn-out death, wounds bared then disbelieved.
A History of Forgetting Page 25
