Lovely Green Eyes
Page 17
“Words can be resisted,” she suggested.
“Catastrophe,” he repeated.
“Night, darkness, the void,” he said.
And then, once more in Hebrew, as though it could not be expressed in German or Hungarian: “Shoah.”
It was getting late.
“My heart is turning to stone,” the rabbi said.
“I doubt that,” she objected.
“My feet are turning to stone.”
“You should sit down.”
“I spent years sitting down.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Neither did I.”
“It’s getting late,” Skinny said.
“We shall have to learn to speak again in order to understand one another.”
Hadn’t Captain Hentschel said something similar to her when she didn’t answer him – that perhaps she was still learning to speak?
“We shall rake our joys together like last year’s dry leaves, those past joys that became memories, and those which we are still looking forward to as a child does to a surprise or a present.”
In his head he heard the Song of Songs. He repeated to himself the proverbs of Solomon, but not one of them seemed right for the moment. And the Psalms seemed flat. He was whispering to himself through barely parted lips, which were dry from thirst and fever.
“You are entitled to hate them,” he said.
“I’m not sure that’s what I want.”
“Robbing a person of joy is like rape.”
He had not missed what she’d said – that humiliating was like killing.
“I would allow you to hate them,” he said.
“I don’t wish to.”
“No-one would be surprised.”
“Even so.”
“No-one would hold it against you.”
“It isn’t in me,” she said.
It seemed funny that, while she was desperate to eat, the rabbi was seeking answers to something he couldn’t understand.
“You had your back against the wall,” the rabbi said.
“My back and my face,” she corrected him.
“You are righteous.”
“I’d rather be full of laughter.”
Before them was the table, the candlestick, its candle still unlit, several plates, the bread on a wooden cutting-board, butter on a little dish, a salt cellar and cutlery. The rabbi wore an old alpaca jacket which was dirty. After supper she would clean it for him. The dark spots on the knife, fork and spoon handles reminded her of the bloodstains on the floor of Dr Krueger’s surgery and the four castrated young men standing by the wall, their arms hanging, ashamed and frightened while the doctor photographed them.
“I’m a little confused by it all,” she said.
“Would you like to light the candle?”
She didn’t hesitate, but picked up the box of matches from the table, took a match out, held it between her right thumb and forefinger, struck it and carefully lit the wick. The flame flickered for a moment, then steadied and grew.
Tears were running down the rabbi’s cheeks.
Could he have gone insane during those ten days? She did not regard herself as entirely sane, but preferred not to examine herself too closely.
“It’s behind me,” she said finally.
“I hope so,” the rabbi replied.
“Are we going to eat?” she asked.
“We are going to eat.”
Then he said: “Perhaps I believe the way your mother would still believe if she were alive.” It sounded to him as if he were really saying that he didn’t believe any more. Was he hoping to convince himself or her? What did he still not know?
“Everything and nothing,” he whispered. “They took life out of our hands and placed it in the hands of others. They took from us what we knew and let people make decisions about us who did not know us.”
“I pretended to be an Aryan, one of them.”
“You were under duress.”
“I knew I could stay alive as long as I wanted. As long as it depended on me.”
She did not want to make the rabbi cry any more, or they would never sit down to supper. “It could have been worse,” she added.
“To them we were ants, to be stepped on with impunity. Parasitic vermin. A blood poisoning.”
Throughout the past ten days, even though he resisted it, the rabbi had identified her with his daughter Erzika whom they took away when she was 14, nearly 15.
“They robbed you both of your childhood,” he said under his breath.
He chased away the image of her being passed from man to man twelve, 13 or 15 times a day. It was not she who had desecrated the Sabbath or any other day. In her place he would have gone mute. In his mind he saw the waters over which she had flown. She had no butterfly wings, only arms, legs and a belly. To him she seemed like a moon which had disappeared for three years and for 21 days and nights before rising again as a slender sickle and ripening into a full moon.
What was the medication the Oberführer had prescribed to the girls? The injections he had given them? Might Erzika face another rabbi the way Skinny was facing him? Might she, like Skinny, encounter the captain and the Obersturmführer? Had fever come upon him to burn away such thoughts? He had been afraid, right up to this tenth day, to answer the question: what had happened to his wife and daughter, to his sister and brother? He did not want to imagine details. Every one of those who had been lost had been somebody, a mother, a father, a daughter or a son, or a child who had died all alone. On the tip of his tongue was another question he dared not ask. Could Skinny have met his daughter or his wife somewhere? Would he wish to meet them himself?
“Just as there was an ice age, a stone age and an iron age, so in the future people will speak of a concentration camp age,” he said.
She remembered what her mother once told her – that a rabbi was not a priest but a teacher.
He saw blackness before his eyes. He shut them. He opened them again and still saw blackness.
“Aren’t you feeling well?”
The rabbi was thinking of his daughter Erzika, his wife Else and his sister Ella. Ofhis brother, ofhis father and mother. Of all his family whom the Germans had killed while he was in hiding in Hungary.
“Maybe their defeat will make them human again,” Skinny suggested.
“Maybe. I hope so. Maybe their children.”
The rabbi looked into the flame of the candle, which was burning down, and at the slices of bread on the plate. At the foot of the candlestick small piles of wax had congealed.
“What use is an oasis in the desert to those the wind has swept away?” he asked.
She thought this might be a fragment of a prayer. Once she had prayed in No. 232 Ost. She had accused herself of her failings, even though she had not given herself away and no-one had discovered who she was. It was a Wednesday, she was waiting for Thursday. She wouldn’t have minded if she didn’t wake up the next morning. There were worse things than not waking up in the morning. The bread and butter on the table made her think of her brother.
At last the rabbi realized that she wanted to eat. He blamed himself for what he described as his unfeeling dilatoriness.
“Let’s eat,” he said.
In her mind she saw the army kitchen at No. 232 Ost, where the girls had peeled potatoes for the Waffen-S S cook during the night. They would eat the raw peelings, wondering if they’d be allowed to take the frozen potatoes away with them.
“They did not know the Commandments,” the rabbi said.
“They had their own.”
“You were living with the devil,” he said.
“Perhaps.”
“The devil had twelve, 13 or 15 names each day.” The words felt heavy on his tongue.
She could have recited to him the names from her last day.
“The local commander here was called Hans Manfred Wunderkind,” the rabbi said.
“They sometimes had odd names.”
> “Every devil has a name.”
“And doctor’s degrees.”
“Devils with doctor’s degrees. With military ranks, birth certificates and citizenships. Every devil has a face.”
“I remember some of them.”
“Some you will forget.”
“I’ll try.”
“Others you’ll never forget.”
“No. I hope not.”
She found it easier to agree with him. She really wanted to eat now. At last they sat down.
“Help yourself,” he said.
“After you.”
“Go ahead.”
“Thank you.”
She took a slice of bread and spread some butter on it, more thinly than the rabbi would have liked. She ate while he thought of all the blood shed during the past six years. He thought of people who no longer needed God, a heart or a soul, who had embraced a new religion. He thought of the problems awaiting those not yet born. What would they wish to know and what would their fathers not want to talk about?
“Isn’t it better not to think about it?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” the rabbi said, using her well-worn phrase.
“I would have given a lot to eat like this at least once during those days.”
“You’ll be dreaming of food even when you’re not hungry.”
“I hope I won’t be hungry. But I have nothing against dreams about food.”
“Dreams don’t forget,” said the rabbi.
“And I’d give a lot to be able to forget.”
“You are still innocent.”
“It would be nice if that were true.”
She swallowed another mouthful. “While I have something to eat and a roof over my head, an open larder, food on the table three times a day, a bath full of hot water, and no longer the fear that I could lose all that at any moment, I don’t feel I have anything to complain about.”
She added: “Here I don’t feel envious of anyone else.”
“You’re a grown-up child,” said the rabbi.
“Is that a good thing?”
“It’s not a bad thing.”
“I don’t know, I really don’t,” she said again.
“Nothing is any longer only good or only bad.”
“It’s better not to look back.”
“Can you manage that?”
“I’ll have to,” she answered.
He was watching her intently as she ate with gusto. She was pretty the rabbi noted, but too thin. She would grow, he told himself, she was still so young. At the same time she had been damaged beyond what was visible, countless times violated and humiliated and whipped.
He could find no words to express this, or numbers to sum it up. He guided himself by the cabbala, in which the sum of one plus one was three. Twelve, 13, 15, 21 days. Not even the cabbala had a solution for such numbers. They remained a mystery.
“You must be hot,” Skinny said.
“Ill undo my jacket.”
“You could open the window if we switched off the light.”
“Not till it’s night.”
“I’m no longer afraid.”
“That’s good. You’ve nothing to be afraid of.”
They both knew that this was not entirely true.
She has beautiful green eyes, Rabbi Schapiro thought to himself. His wife and daughter had had such eyes.
“Go on, eat,” he encouraged her, to prove to himself that he could still speak.
“Thank you. I’ve had all I can eat.”
“Have some honey.”
“I’ve had some.”
“You’ve a lot of catching up to do.”
“Something, certainly.”
“Three or six years?”
She smiled at him like a child at an adult or an adult at a child.
“Our ship sank,” he said. “Only some scattered shipwrecks survived.”
He looked at her carefully combed ginger hair, parted in the middle and still damp from her bath.
“Our train was derailed,” he continued. “The brakes, which used to function, failed.”
“Time I went to bed,” Skinny said. She would wash his shirts in the morning, she decided, even though it was the Sabbath. She would get it done before he woke.
“You should eat something before going to bed,” she said. “It doesn’t do you any good to only drink. I saw people in the camp who didn’t eat even the little they could have eaten.”
He did not ask her why, but if he had, she would not have told him that they had lost the will to live. Was the rabbi afraid that perhaps the war was not over yet, that some part of it might come back? She was looking forward to the moment when she could take off the clothes, underwear and woollen stockings that had belonged to Erzika. Was he waiting for the candle to burn down? Face to face with Skinny the rabbi felt older than the world, older than the stars and infinity. Older than the cabbala and all the sacred books. Older than the hidden meaning of all things. He was afraid to return to the faded meaning of the laws, precepts, customs and ceremonies. To the guiding principle ofhis religious and civic life. To the exegesis of the great prophets, to that which had not been published in print but which the girl in the tall chair in front of him had gone through.
God, Rabbi Gideon Schapiro said to himself, why have you taken away our pride and exposed us to contempt? Why have you driven us out of the light into darkness, us, your Chosen People? Why did you make the exalted low, the noble rotten, why did you deprive the wise of their reason, the weak of their strength, the desperate of their hope? Why did you permit the enemy we did not know to oppress us like the lowest of slaves? Why did you not let us sleep on that first night they humiliated and dishonoured us, never to awaken again? Why did you make us keep a soul in a dead body?
“It’s gone,” the rabbi whispered.
He sounded confused to her again. What was gone? She had no idea that the rabbi was referring to his soul. She had seen a lot of people in that state. She didn’t say anything, she didn’t even move, she just let the rabbi unburden himself.
“I’d like to say that we are rising from the ashes,” the rabbi said feverishly, “but we are drowning in them, you and I.”
Was the mountain of ashes so big that it had drowned their God?
“I’m free from it,” she assured the rabbi.
“You’re not.”
“Yes, I am,” she insisted. “I am with you.”
“Perhaps you will be free one day.”
“I’m sure of it.”
“As sure as there’s a heaven above me.”
“If that’s what you want to hear.”
The old grandfather clock struck ten – their usual bedtime. The rabbi blew out the candle.
“It’s stopped raining,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s stopped.”
She was happy she didn’t have to get up at 4.30 a.m., but could sleep until the light woke her. There would be no Oberführer sounding an alarm.
She waited for the rabbi to rise from his chair and then rose herself. His legs were shaking, but she pretended not to notice. That tenth day with the rabbi had made her see how a person lost his mind, how he could be seized by insanity like an invisible rain falling on parched ground.
He did not want to be locked in a world into which he had been forced by what had happened, yet at the same time he could not get into the world he didn’t understand. These two worlds were confronting one another in his head like two tanks, or like two warships sailing towards one another in the dark of night. The line on his forehead had deepened and perspiration was collecting in it. In his dark eyes a madness had taken root, flushed up by tears, but a madness with which one could live. Rabbi Gideon Schapiro was weeping again.
She left on the eleventh day, when she felt she should go and it seemed safe. The rabbi looked on her as on Mount Everest that could not be climbed, as on the Pacific Ocean that could not be swum, as on the abyss of all time. He felt dizzy, perhaps because
he had not eaten properly for ten days. She had mostly been eating by herself. He fasted, wanting to starve as she had done. She had put on weight during her stay with him, she had filled out a little, though not much. Her silky, ginger hair had grown again.
He gave her a gold pocket watch on a chain, which played the Hungarian anthem. He had two – one had belonged to Elsa and the other had been his daughter’s. The latter he had traded with the baker for bread. He saw her to the door. He had not been out in the street for ten days.
She went to the station, to meet the two railwaymen who had taken her to the rabbi. One of them gave her a pair of high lace-up boots with metal studs. They would last her some time.
“Yes, God is within you,” the rabbi had said at the door.
These were the last words that Hanka Kaudersovâ would hear from Rabbi Gideon Schapiro.
Part Four
Ten
We were sitting in a café in Prague. Skinny was telling her story in bits and pieces.
There had been nights when she couldn’t sleep and when she imagined how time had slowed down for people in the gas chamber, when they could no longer breathe and every fraction of a second seemed endless. She would ask herself what right she had to live when all those she had known, including her mother and father, her brother and uncles and grandmothers and aunts and grandfathers, were no longer alive. It remained with her for a long time, as a cry whose echo did not fall silent. She had dark circles under her eyes, as she’d had in No. 232 Ost. She was paralyzed by the shadows cast by what she had behind her and before her.
In the first months after the war she mixed with a small crowd of those who had survived because the Germans had killed someone else in their place. A crowd of daughters without mothers, fathers without sons and sons without fathers, widows, a few elderly women and men, and a handful of children. She became used to a world without uniforms. She had a better memory than she would have wished. She laughed when Adler remarked that he had a memory like Emmental cheese. Echoes, images, words, shouted commands and places and colours chased each other round her head. Snippets of what had happened; where, how, to whom. That selection one Monday morning when it was raining and she was thinking to herself that if they picked her she would get soaked on the truck on the way to the gas chamber and arrive wet through.