by Ivan Klíma
Within a week, my brother – scarcely three years old – came down with a fever. Someone offered my mother a tablet, but she was frightened to give him anything without a doctor’s prescription. So instead she sat by his mattress, and while he cried she tried to sing to him in the quietest of voices, almost a whisper. (Where had the days gone when she used to sing to me night after night in her soft, heart-warm, pain-free voice. Oh, my dear wee son, In the field so wide There stands a castle by the babbling river’s side!) She must have sung to him all night. So many nights without a glimmer of hope, nights like fringes on a cape tied with a cord at the neck; in the morning someone rushed in to tell them that a sick-bay had just been opened. So she wrapped my brother up in several blankets and carried him through the chilly corridors. In time I was to discover that the system of corridors was rational and simple in true Maria Teresa style, but on that occasion we rushed round and round in circles going up and down staircases coming out in places we’d never seen before or in places we’d come to more than once already. Then someone shouted at us to make ourselves scarce, that there were Germans on the way, but it was too late, they appeared out of nowhere: two men with black jackboots and skull badges on the front of their caps.
We went rigid, our backs pressed to the wall, and my mother clutched to herself the bundle of blankets encircling a crying mouth. I stood several paces in front of her, terrified that the disorderly cries would infuriate the two masters of our fate then approaching.
And that is the scene as I still recall it: the long corridor with its many unglazed arched windows and a row of dark-coloured doors, two policemen whose heavy footsteps were coming nearer and nearer; armed justice on the march, requiring the world to bare its head; and my mother motionless by the wall, with her pale, exhausted face, my mother clutching a bundle of blankets from which crying could be heard.
Meanwhile through the arches of the never glazed windows flakes of snow drifted out of a chill ash-grey sky and even started to settle on the floor of the corridor, making the black of the approaching jackboots even blacker and even more menacing, therefore.
2
The first time the barrack gates opened for us was in the middle of winter. Under the supervision of a local policeman with a rifle, two men in dark overcoats were carrying my brother out on a stretcher. Hanuš had fallen ill with scarlet fever; I had got over my own attack and now – wrapped up in a blue winter coat – cheerfully stamped along at the side of the stretcher. The free snow lay knee-high. Somewhere in the distance whole armies were being smothered in snow, but I didn’t see them, all I saw was the man in front carrying a dark lantern and the empty street before me. I recall it all like a Bruegel painting, although maybe slightly less apocalyptic. I can even hear the rustle of crows’ wings, the crunch of the crisp snow and my brother’s quiet moans. My brother was afraid they were taking him away from his mother. I leant towards him so that he knew I was there and had nothing to fear, and he slipped his hand out from under the blanket and gripped me fiercely. And I walked alongside the stretcher in the freshly fallen snow, with what seemed free space about me at last, and it was a blissful moment when I became aware of the change. It was as if liberty was already mine, as if I were not just moving between two prison buildings, as if I was unaware that in a few moments this outing would come to an end. What can it have all meant to my brother at the age of three? Once, many years later, I asked him if he sometimes recalled those days. ‘Well, it’s a funny thing,’ he said, ‘it never struck me that I ought to try and remember too.’ And he made an effort to bring back something that happened there to at least one of his friends, but couldn’t remember anything except that on the front of the barracks just below our window there hung two plaster horses’ heads that frightened him. He was unable to remember, even though he has a better memory than I; that period had torn itself away from his memory like a top-heavy boulder and fallen into the depths. But I couldn’t forget. I was older, at the age which we all carry within us as the age of innocence and first perceptions. I carry my boulder around within me, but I have got so used to it that I stopped being aware of it long ago. I have become accustomed to not thinking about it. Even at the time I was becoming used to it: to not thinking about the long slips of paper with name, date and number, which signalled a step into the unknown; to not taking any notice of the weeping or terror of others, those who were selected; to not thinking about the emptying rooms, the people who had spoken to me not long before and would never say anything to me again; to not becoming attached to anyone or anything, when everyone and everything was destined for destruction; to not thinking about Osi who could walk on his hands or Ruda who almost knew off by heart Dr Holub’s Journey to Mashakulumbu and could talk about Dr Schweitzer’s hospital as if he’d visited it himself, or about timid, sickly Olga who apparently gave her first concert at the age of ten, so that I even stopped remembering Arie, though not so long before I had been incapable of conceiving of a day without him.
So I became practised at it and their shades ceased to affect me and I no longer encounter them even in dreams. When I walked round the museum at Auschwitz some years ago, past piles of battered suitcases marked with big enamel signs, I realised that I’d forgotten even my friends’ surnames.
Arie used to wear a little skull-cap: the yarmulke. He would never stay and play with us till evening but would always go off and pray the maariv. I found it odd or even a waste of time. I was sorry for him. And then the day came when I felt that I liked him, although I can’t remember the immediate reason why. I was unable to get to sleep that night. Up I got from my palliasse, got dressed and slipped out of the room without making the slightest sound. I ran along the long corridor. Arie’s father was chairman of the Council of Elders, so he lived with his family in an apartment. It was an incredible refuge with real beds, cupboards, a table and chairs, situated at the opposite side of the building. I had to pass many doors before eventually finding myself in front of the right one. Then I waited with thumping heart to find out if he too was awake and would come out so that we might meet.
He had paper and coloured pencils and would draw people and things there, even though it was strictly forbidden. He gave me a couple of sheets and lent me pencils, and we would sit together on a wide parapet and draw the yard: the food queue and dozens of figures. He could capture the rampart walls in perspective, the play of light and shade, and could even draw a cart and horses, while my lines would go all over the place instead of forming the appropriate shapes. He made me a present of one of his pictures, and I still have it, a drawing of an old woman, surely dead by now. She is seated on a folding stool, wooden clogs on her feet, spectacles on her nose, a yellow star on her breast, an outsized yellow star, and a blue vein on her forehead; and above her the grey barrack wall, leaning slightly as if it was about to collapse; it is broken in only one place by a curving window and in the middle of it, on a white window ledge, sits a crow. Whenever I look at the picture, it conjures up that strange, almost unbelievable world, and I realise with shock that I once lived in it. I know I ought to pass the picture on to the museum, in fact they once wrote to me and asked me whether I had some relic of those years, but I said no. It is the only souvenir I have of him, most likely the only one that anyone has.
There were days when we felt happy. We would play pig-in-the-middle on a small flat area between the barracks and the wooden building where the women peeled mica, and when it rained we held button-football tournaments or sat in a corner of a barracks corridor, telling each other the plots of stories we had read back in the days when we still had access to books. I’ve already forgotten the names of the novels that the others recounted (I myself told the stories of the Pickwick Club – having brought a copy of the Pickwick Papers with me from home – and the adventures of Tom Sawyer, which I loved) but I could be amazingly fascinated even by fragments of other stories and characters: Tecumseh (which meant Wild Cat Leaping on its Prey, if my memory serves me right) who strives in
vain to save his Indian land, and Leather Stocking who tracks through the wilds to save his daughter abducted by the Indians, and Quonab who prays to the Great Spirit
Father, we are walking in darkness
Father, we understand nothing
As we traverse the darkness we bow our heads
and the high-minded William Penn, who declared that liberty without obedience was confusion, obedience without liberty was slavery, and Edison who said that his ancestors were fighters while he was just an old engineer engaged in the work of peace. And I can still remember the names of dozens of Indian tribes (in the distorted form I heard them from the lips of my friends) and the names of towns and rivers such as Santa Fe, Little Bighorn, Oswego and Detroit and Luenge. And now in turn the names of the lakes, countries and mountains of those distant continents conjure up a picture of that gloomy corridor: raindrops falling on wet parapets; and oddly enough I feel nostalgic, and I can’t tell whether it’s a nostalgia for my childhood years or for the never-never land of free proud noble men and endless space that seemed so unreal and incredible in the closed and impenetrable hollow of the barracks corridor.
Arie never told stories like that, he only read historical novels, besides the Torah and the Talmud.
I knew nothing of Jewish theology or traditions, and for years I didn’t even know the word Jew. I couldn’t understand its fateful connection with my own life, and I hadn’t the slightest notion of Jewish culture, language and literature, let alone the calendar, feast days and ceremonies.
What’s the Talmud? Arie told me that it was the teaching and wisdom of the old rabbis.
I wanted him to relate me something from that book, and he really did tell me several stories and I recall how in one of them evil spirits appear. I asked him, almost in amazement, whether he believed in evil spirits and he replied that in the days when those books were written, learned and devout men undoubtedly saw evil spirits. And where are they then? What has become of those evil spirits nowadays? They’ve gone into people, of course. He even smiled at my question. That answer stayed in my memory, although I can’t tell whether it was his own, or whether he was merely repeating someone else’s answer to his own question.
Why mustn’t people work on a Saturday?
The Sabbath day is the day of peace. At one time man lived in the Garden of Eden at peace with Him who created everything, blessed be His name, and with all creation. Man did not kill. He used the fruits without toiling in the sweat of his face. He warmed himself without fire and reaped without sowing. It is a great joy that at least one day in the week we can recall the time of peace and bliss.
None of it made any sense to me. After all, they were all just fables; man had risen from the ape and never lived in Paradise. Was it possible that someone could believe such stories?
I also vaguely remember how he would tell me with enthusiasm about the old law (he himself wanted to study law when the war was over and we went home again), about the Sanhedrin which judged more justly than courts today, and which could sentence to death in four different ways and for many different crimes, although it preferred not to use the death penalty at all. But I can no longer separate in my memory what I heard from him and what I read later and merely connected with him as being something he might have told me.
The stories and events have gone from my memory, but what stuck in it for ever was the nobility of his appearance. I greatly wished to resemble him. Even years later I strove to imitate his gestures and manner of speech. Little did I know that nobility is the most inimitable of qualities. It must be innate and it can develop only in those souls capable of perceiving in the world the presence of God, under whatever name, and acting in harmony with it of their own accord, not because they are commanded to.
My brother Hanuš was always falling ill. He was small, thin and pale – from time to time I would be troubled in the evenings by the nagging thought that he might not last out the night and he would be no more. At the end of autumn he fell seriously ill. The doctor who did casualty duty said he suspected pneumonia and advised my mother to leave my brother in sick-bay. But my mother decided she’d wait a day more, and put Hanuš to bed in our inhospitable room. She sat up with him that night but in the morning she had to go to work and I stayed alone with my brother. I knew that I was not to leave him even for a moment, and at mid-day was to change his compress, warm him some coffee on the stove and give it him to drink.
My brother lay completely still on the mattress, covered up to the chin with a soiled sheet, his eyes closed, his cheeks unusually flushed and his breathing raucous.
I sat down on the edge of the mattress; he opened his eyes slightly and moved his lips. It was not to ask for drink or food, but for me to tell him stories. Not very long before I had been at the age of listening to stories myself and I knew many, I had even read an account of the siege of Troy, with brave Achilles and Hector. So I talked to my little brother as requested. I told stories to myself and to him, both to lull him to sleep and to ease my own anxiety. I was afraid. I was afraid something terrible would happen, that Hanuš would start to call out in his fever, that he’d begin to cry or squirm, that he’d stop breathing, that an SS man would appear out of nowhere and tell us to get up. But my brother would be unable to get up and we would be punished on the spot and sent to Poland with the next transport. But my brother wouldn’t survive that journey and would die in the freezing draughts of that cold wagon.
Towards noon, my brother fell asleep and I rushed off impatiently for my lunch. I always relished the thought of what the cook might lavish on me; maybe there’d be dumplings with sweet sauce or at least potatoes with mustard sauce, but today I was determined to forgo my lunch and let Hanuš have it instead. He needed his strength. When I returned, he was lying exactly as I’d left him. So I put the plate of food on the floor by his bed and shook him. But instead of looking at me and sitting up, he just opened his eyelids slightly, and behind them I could see nothing but the bloodshot whites of his eyes. I shouted at him to wake up, that I’d brought his food; he had to eat for goodness sake, or at least drink something. But he didn’t move, he couldn’t hear me, and it occurred to me that my little brother was dying. What was I to do? Where was I to run for help? I remembered being told some time that Auntie Simona had once saved her husband by giving him blood. But I didn’t know – I’d forgotten to ask – how one goes about giving someone else one’s blood . . . I soaked a towel in cold water, as my mother had instructed, and wrapped it round my brother’s small form. Then I found a needle in my mother’s work-box, closed my eyes and pricked my finger as hard as I could. The pain that ran through me made me cry out and then I watched the drop of blood welling up on my finger. I leaned over my brother and pressed my finger to his half-open lips. The blood slowly trickled out, turning his teeth and lips crimson and staining his chin. His appearance startled me. I wiped my finger and took his littler hand in mind. I thought to myself that if I pressed it hard enough my blood would flow into his veins. And maybe that’s what happened. Blood or some kind of power flowed from me into him. He began to breathe more calmly, then opened his eyes slightly and once more I could see his irises, which unlike mine were light grey, not dark brown. I asked if he needed anything and he just whispered to me to tell him a story. But I’d already told him all the ones I knew, so I had to think one up. So I started to dream up my own fairy tale – I knew I had to keep talking to drive away Death who was already standing at the head of his bed, as well as to calm the beating of my own heart, summon up all mysterious forces to assist me and bring me at least a droplet of the elixir of life. And that droplet truly did fall upon his eyelids and he opened them wide and gazed at me in such pain and devotion, so helpless and vulnerable, that I will never forget that look as long as I live.
Soon after that, they started to give puppet shows in the loft of our barracks. Anywhere else, I would have considered it undignified for someone my age to laugh at Mr Punch or watch a wooden Simple Simon fight a d
ragon, but since there was almost nothing cheerful to see in that place I even persuaded my little brother to come to the show.
Maybe for the sake of us older ones, a clown came out on to the stage at the start of the show. He spread his white lips into a broad grin, stared at us all with dark mournful eyes, then doffed his scarlet hat and bowed. He was dressed in a shiny yellow costume with just one sleeve and one leg the same colour as his hat, and at every sharp movement the bells on his legs jingled. He said his name was Harlequin and he’d come to tell us some stories. He walked towards the front row and tripped but didn’t fall; instead he did a somersault and came and sat on the edge of the stage. Then he asked someone in the front row their name and if they could read. Then he recited:
A little man came visiting
In a jacket brown
But when we took it off him
It made us weep and frown.
We were supposed to guess what it was, but no one guessed that it was supposed to be an onion. The clown did another somersault in the aisle between the chairs and I laughed with pleasure. But all of a sudden he was standing in front of me. I hunched my shoulders and stared at the floor, but he placed his hand on my shoulder and asked my name. When I told him he asked me a riddle:
