7
The life of Icek Bienenfeld
This Israeli photographer of Polish origin became notorious in the most liberal sectors of his country’s society in the sixties, when he wrote comic strips for the Jerusalem Post under the pseudonym of Norman. He satirized Golda Meier and Moshe Dayan with caricatures that reversed their most obvious traits: he made Dayan seem very fat with a moveable bun on the top of his head, and his Meier wore a patch over one eye. However, Bienenfeld soon got bored of that and opened a photography studio in the new part of Jerusalem. His camera has taken photos of all the most renowned Israelis and many official photos carry his signature. One day in 1992—he remembers it was very early because he was in a bad mood and unable to utter a word, and that may be why it was the best time for her to choose—his wife told him she was divorcing him. Lena left him for another man, although she didn’t make it that clear at the time. He was a cardiologist, Ariel Kreptchuk, but Icek only found that out later. To begin with, she went to live with Sonia, a friend, with whom Icek had had an affair. Fifteen years ago, for God’s sake! He soon found that he was fifty—he only later fully realized—with a life as full as his house, with piles of possessions, and a future it was better not to burden with too many deadlines. He smoked and he coughed. Tobacco had taken many of his good friends in the neighborhood to the other side, and he, a man whose lungs had been damaged by tuberculosis and pneumonia as a child, had purchased, with excessive foresight, tickets in the raffle for cancer. And had bought them in abundance, what with the forty plus cigarettes he smoked a day. Perhaps that is why, when he’d assimilated the news of his divorce (Lena was much younger than he was, and had realized that her role from then on would be to fill in the cracks in the boat before it sank and had thus opted to re-make her life, since their love was marooned in the stagnant waters of the past), Bienenfeld burned all the photos he had of Lena, even those he had of them as a couple together, sold their house, split the money with her and decided to set out on a journey he had been deferring and never found an opportunity to undertake. “Out of insecurity, or fear, because I’m one of those birds that thinks that the forest floor is up there.” He put himself on a passenger list held by a travel agency, Shalom, that offered tours around Europe with a variety of itineraries. Almost all began or finished in Barcelona, because of that year’s Olympic Games, but others were very different, with visits to some of the concentration camps: Dachau, Buchenwald, Mathausen . . . Auschwitz. He chose the last one because he knew it was the place where he had been born twice. “That’s literally the truth: my mother and the Russians,” he told me. He remembers nothing of either; perhaps with the help of pyschoanalysis he might have extracted from the pit of memory a great gray cloud of suffering, as gray as the Zyklon B produced by Farben, since that was all there had been to his childhood, suffering and more suffering. His mother? His father? His grandparents? His brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins? Did they ever exist? “They are as real as a set of prints of the Crusades!” he would say. These questions had buzzed around his head for years but never found a possible answer. He barely managed to establish that his family origins were Polish. He liked to think they came from Warsaw because he liked people who were born there. Someone who had survived told him that he might perhaps be a child of a family that had immediately been scattered around the camp, some gassed and others tortured. Bienenfeld was sure that fellow had got it wrong, that he had mistaken his family for another, or at least had no proof of what he was affirming. And what proof would have been eloquent enough? But it was better than nothing, better to have one probable scenario, rather than a hundred unreal ones, as went one of the titles of the popular writer Sholem Aleichem, and the day he bought his ticket from the Shalom travel agency with stops—according to his itinerary—in Vienna – Munich – Amsterdam – Hamburg – Berlin – Warsaw – Krakow – Auschwitz – Prague and then back to Israel, he wagered on that remote possibility. Hurbinek was returning to Auschwitz and was returning by himself.
8
The life of Walter Hanna
Hurbinek was going to Auschwitz, but not anymore.
Now here we have Walter Hanna, fifty-nine years of age, an ironic, seductive radio journalist specializing in sports—football, boxing, and above all swimming—residing in Salonika, Greece, 15 Mitropoleos Street, in an attic from which one can see the White Tower (he has always lived there, they’ll even put a plaque on the façade). Single and homosexual, he has lived his life alone but not isolated; he has shared his most recent life with a lover, the singer Dimitriou Mitarakis, who has just died. He was his only family, plus friends, dozens of friends, because Walter Hanna is a very sociable, charismatic man. He also discovered he has AIDS and hasn’t long to live, “I have loved so much . . . ” he silently consoles himself and is not afraid. “Those of us who survived the Nazis can never be frightened again,” he liked to say, “and possess a mysterious durability.” He has lived on the edge, true enough, and squeezed dry the boundaries of every transgression, perhaps because he thought that “mysterious endurability” made him immune. When Dimitriou died, he told him,“I have been very happy.” He kissed him on the lips and added,“Thank you.” But now in the spring of 2001 Walter Hanna is in a hospital, on the outskirts of Berlin. That is what he requested, almost insisted upon, he doesn’t want to enter Berlin, he wants to be as far away as possible from the Unter den Linden and Friedrichstrasse; Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, that “Germany above all,” echoes around his head and gives him goose bumps; he remembers that Joseph Roth, whom he reads and re-reads frequently, had already said that no Jew went to Berlin of his own free will. He is in the hospital because he has been in a car accident, like me, when he was driving to Auschwitz. He didn’t mean to go through Berlin, but he’d been misled several times by the German motorway signs and took the wrong turn. The map in his rented car was no use, was too old. Before he realized it, he was already twenty-five miles from the capital, and any other route, back to Dresden or down to Prague, would have have sidetracked him even more. Then he skidded and crashed into a camper that was parked on the hard shoulder. It’s not serious, but they gave him a blood test in hospital and confirmed what he already knew. The medical report has the hint of a fatal diagnosis: he is bleeding internally and it’s dangerous to continue in such state. “How strange,” he thought, “it’s as if they were sentencing me to death here, yet again, fifty years later.”
He was always Jewish and always lived among Jews. The Sephardis of Salonika, savagely reduced after the war, welcomed him as they did so many thousands who came from the camps and were on their way down to Palestine. He was in a truck full of moribund children. Only five were saved, and he was one, and nobody remembered his real name, so he gave himself the one he has now when it was time to go into the army, perhaps because he liked Walter Rogas, an Italian sporting journalist. He was declared unfit for service because his legs were shorter than normal. Now that he knows his end is near, he decided to go to Auschwitz and confront his destiny, face the inevitable pilgrimage to that kernel of History. But now finds himself in a German hospital, unable to move, and at the mercy of ghosts. Hurbinek will never make it to Auschwitz. At least for a second time.
Nevertheless there is something that is still possible, an absurd hope: that Walter Hanna, the journalist whose voice in Greece is as famous as Melina Mercouri’s, is really inhabiting the same present as myself, the very same day, the very same hour as I imagine him, not very far away, in another German town, both of us simultaneously in hospital. And it could be absolutely for real, it could be true that at the very moment when I am rescuing Hurbinek from the dead and giving him a life, the real Walter Hanna, or whatever his name is, is there, in that hospital, because he was really born in Auschwitz and had really made the journey, his life’s last, that far. Then Hurbinek had certainly lived über alles, above all else, as the hymn goes.
VIII
TWO WORDS OR PERHAPS ONE
Henek has got up and attuned his ears to try to catch the words apparently coming out of Hurbinek’s mouth.
For several days the child has been uttering a sound that is incomprehensible to those surrounding him in the barrack. In fact, they are two words—mass-klo, matisklo—or perhaps just one, the variations introduced by his hoarse, agonizing breathing. Patzold, who first mistook them for Bohemian vowels, is reminded of Latin declinations, with their different endings and suffixes, and consequently imagines Hurbinek to be Romanian in origin, though as far as he knows there are very few Romanians in the camp.
In that cold, dark February, Henek, sitting on one side of the child’s bed—a sort of cradle he himself made—observes the small bulk that is Hurbinek, who cannot curl up because his legs have gone dead, and crosses Hurbinek’s hands over his chest, in a position straining to retain heat, where his breath can reach them, though he shivers constantly.
Henek strokes the woollen hat with ear flaps they have given him. Hurbinek’s gaunt, dirty face, that seems even more gloomy in the dim light filtering through the cracks from outside, sways rhythmically on a pillow stuffed with straw. He looks more like a doll than a child. Henek listens attentively, tirelessly, to the language of his protégé.
He thinks there are two words, one ending in as and the other in o. Some, like Primo Levi or Franz Patzold, argue they can only hear one, one spoken hesitantly, uttered inevitably haltingly because of his gasps, as if he had hiccups (hence the sudden separation of the two syllables or aspirated tis sound). Sometimes Henek hears maschs glo and at others claims that the second word, transformed into blo and then klo is repeated twice or three times, with the syllables switching place: blo - klo - blo - klo. The boy might even be saying three words: mass [maschs] blo klo. And these three words belong to the refrain of a lullaby rather than a sentence with any meaning. They remind Henek remotely of the words of a lullaby he knows, although he is sure the words aren’t Hungarian. He explained that to everyone, when, as well as asking how many words little Hurbinek is uttering, they wonder what they might mean. Henek felt they were very similar to “the mill wish woosh” he recalled in a dialect ditty sung by peasant women in the Beskides, a lullaby children repeated, imitating the sounds animals and objects make on a farm.
dar ruk ko ko
dar bletz crep crep
dar maschs blu blo
[cock doodle doo
fire crackle crackle
mill wish woosh]
Ernst Sterman thought Hurbinek was trying to say his name, but when had he ever learned such a thing? As for Scholomo Buczko the cobbler, he was simply whimpering like a sick baby animal. For others, like Rubem Yetzev, the word spoken by Hurbinek was simply a word of affection he had repeatedly heard at intervals in his short life, a kind of “duck,”“luvvie” or “darling” or just “my little one,” said by someone, perhaps his mother, or by whoever picked him up and saved him and brought him there where, alone and lost, he was clinging to a survival that seemed increasingly unlikely. For school master Yetzev they were the only warm, loving words Hurbinek had heard in his short little life, words whispered by a trembling voice, in danger, at a decisive moment, that he now repeated like a small animal stiff with cold and fear, hoping to hear the affectionate tone of that protective voice that had taught him them before disappearing. The psalm-like insistence with which Hurbinek said those words in all his suffering was but his instinctive expression of despair and anguish.
Gradually, as days went by, they all became increasingly obsessed by those short words. They were fascinated by their ambiguous, indefinable meaning. Each individual detected the meaning he wanted to hear for himself: some longed for songs from their childhood, other recalled the innocence of their early years or were transported by melancholy to a moment when they were happy, one of those moments that is as hard as a rock and rushes back into the memory like a lost paradise that, when times are bad, can prop up an entire life. Each of them, in the foul-smelling barrack, thought of a moment in the past that was frozen in time, abstracted from history, when they experienced the happy eternity they so longed for, a state of stillness, a premature but sweet anticipation of death.
In the words of Hurbinek, everyone began to want to utter a language of their own, a language without past or present, or at any rate without the past they abandoned as the greatest exercise in horror a human being could ever suffer. They all wanted to remove themselves from that place and time and fly off on the gurgles made by that moribund baby to a life of quiet elsewhere, that would preserve them in a bubble of the most elemental bliss, that relates every feeling and moment of warmth to the maternal bosom.
The dirty blankets covering Hurbinek are his real language. In his heart of hearts, Henek, the extreme realist, understands that with a survivor’s keen common sense stripped of metaphor. And that contradiction between lullaby or loving whisper, as absent from Auschwitz as the sun is from the night and the filth all around, makes Henek weep in the early morning, when dawn’s icy light brings a tinge of blue to the excrement from patients with dysentery that is dotted throughout the barrack. By his side Hurbinek grates his gritted teeth: he wasn’t asleep. His large eyes were simply entering a state of lethargy in which his gasps blotted out the slightest sound he articulated, but Henek knew that wasn’t a dream, only an extreme point of exhaustion in Hurbinek’s hurried search for an answer to his requests, expressed in that clumsy, inchoate language.
Reality, like pain, made its mark once more during those weeks: someone died (Abrahan Levine, from diphtheria, cared for as best he could by Rubem Yetzev); some extracted food from the Polish nurses and others waited in their beds, trying to recover the strength that had deserted them. Hurbinek’s words thus became one more element in that reality, transfigured nonetheless into a symbol of what those men were experiencing. That obsessed them for a month: deciphering, understanding, interpreting those three miserable, enigmatic, barely audible words, because they knew they might be the only words possible at such a time, at that precise moment.
Those able to move took shifts night and day by the side of Hurbinek’s bed, hoping that the Word, just one, might be revealed in all its purity, that would allow them to surrender to him and save their life. And be saved, thanks to that word they surmised but never heard, or at least that was what some—Berek Goldstein or Chaim Roth—imagined. Hurbinek became for many an extraordinary Messiah in a process of silent self-immolation.
In a way, those men depended on the language imposed by Hurbinek, since at the end of the day they unconsciously began to think that those words expressed what they themselves wanted to say though they realized to their astonishment they never did; words that enclosed ambiguous meanings, like the periods in Chemistry for Primo Levi, and sought a way out to reach the name from the world of the unnameable: “hunger” or “fear” or “bread” or “heat,” or perhaps a blind, deep, elemental demand for an explanation via a robust verb the young boy could never find; at best or above all, those words merely wanted to ask “why?” And that was why they snatched at scraps of knowledge in childish verse or the most primeval “I love you.” They were returning to that primitive, primary language for urgently naming fear, desire or dire necessity.
The Birthday Buyer Page 11
