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Lovely Green Eyes

Page 18

by Arnost Lustig


  For Adler, his past was a cat with nine lives. For me it was a tree protected by botanists, planted a long time ago.

  “Are you afraid of the past?” she asked him.

  Adler acted like a tiger with broken teeth, still able to tear off a chunk of meat and swallow it faster than he should – so that he never properly digested it.

  “I see you’re making progress,” he replied. “I was beginning to suspect that you were afraid of the present.”

  He was still trying to decide whether to look on Skinny as a victim or a heroine. He had not yet started writing his book about people in the camps. Evil and ugliness were bottomless; he realized that it was easier to focus on the brighter aspects, but there were many more of the darker ones. Evil was heavy, and good as light as a feather. There were no scales for it, or yardsticks.

  “All right, so either we kill the past,” Adler said, “or we make it into shackles for our legs.”

  He regarded the past as a trap. Where instruments of torture were concerned he did not wish to go into details.

  When the talk turned to whether we had learnt anything useful in the camps, Skinny said, quicker than Adler or I expected:

  “I don’t think I learnt anything.” She probably hadn’t wanted to. “Should I have learnt from Dr Krueger how to castrate Jewish boys? Or choose girls to send to field brothels as prostitutes?” Adler asked her no further questions.

  “Well, just look at all the things Jindra Kraus learnt.” He pointed at me.

  She stiffened at the sight of people in green huntsmen’s hats with badger brushes. She thought the items of German Afrika-Korps uniforms, which youngsters were wearing like a trophy, rather ridiculous. There must have been an army surplus store in Prague because so many people wore these uniforms.

  Skinny regularly reported to the welfare department of the Jewish Community. People were searching for their missing relations. Each day new lists of returnees were posted up. She hung on to the boots that the railwayman had given to her in Pecs as if to a talisman. She counted her haircuts, gratified that her ginger hair had not been made into mattresses, blankets or rope ladders for U-boats. At night she no longer had to relieve herself into a saucepan or mug to avoid going out in the rain. And during the day, when her turn came, she no longer had to get soup put into a mug, once every 24 hours. Sometimes the soup had been so hot that those who had no mug and had to have it poured into their palms let it spill on the floor. Then they had to content themselves with one helping of soup for 48 hours. She no longer had to hold her nose at the excrement tubs, as in the Frauenkonzentrationslager. Nor did she have to use the latrine at No. 232 Ost. She was living at Belgickâ 24, in a Jewish orphanage which the National Committee had returned to the Jewish Community. She no longer slept on a three-tier bunk, but in a clean bed with a pillow filled with goose feathers. She no longer had to be either healthy or dead. She did not have to look out on the chimneys of Crematoria No. 2 and No. 3.

  Apart from a few clothes, she didn’t wish to own anything after the war. It would have been too painful to lose it all again. She thought of little Ramon who, at the age of 13, a fortnight after being accepted among the grown-ups, they had fed on Zyklon B.

  “You’re pretty,” Ervin Adler acknowledged.

  “Yes, they called me Die Schöne.”

  “Your hair’s coming back very nicely. Can you imagine how many eiderdowns and pillows they could stuff it with? Or line winter coats or insulate houses? Don’t say we haven’t had the devil’s own luck.”

  “Why the devil’s?”

  “I don’t rely on Heaven any more,” Adler grinned. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

  The sky was blue, the weather was perfect. It had been fine for a week. Adler said he had three tickets for a football match. She was thinking how they might have taken Ramon along.

  “I’ve grabbed hold of the future,” Adler assured her, as though she had asked him.

  “Who hasn’t?” she answered. “Besides, we have no other choice.”

  Adler, like Skinny, had come to realize that his experiences were incommunicable to others. Sometimes he regretted this, at other times he didn’t care. He would turn to the written word; it was less recalcitrant. He tried to persuade us to do the same. He wouldn’t try-too hard to describe physical suffering. He was searching for an eleventh commandment to complete the notorious Ten. Perhaps: Thou shalt not humiliate anyone. The Germans did not set up concentration camps in order to concentrate people there. They had killed on a conveyor belt as never before in history. But Adler did not want this to become a s trait jacket. He didn’t feel like a victim, but he was simply unable to put what had happened behind him.

  No doubt there were some things about Adler that Skinny liked. He was interested in the inner reserves of a human being, with the struggle that individuals wage with themselves. The Germans didn’t interest him all that much; he tended to ignore them as though Germany was no longer on the map of Europe. He was interested in something else: In what respect could a person be better? Adler looked at pictures of the delighted crowds in Berlin, or at Nuremberg, as they prepared for war – when they believed themselves to be superhuman, a master race. First they humiliated their opponents, hoping that every member of the “lower race” would personally acknowledge his inferiority and be grateful to his murderers. Adler was both fascinated and irritated by certain German words, such as Endlösung, Final Solution; Übersiedlung, Resettlement; Sonderbehandlung, Special Treatment. And also by the articles on the punctuality of the railways, the development of the autobahn network, or how Hitler had been fond of dogs and children. He was furious when one magazine article declared that Hitler and Churchill were tarred with the same brush. It suggested that Hitler might not have known about all the atrocities. Was time blurring the differences between truth and falsehood, between guilt and innocence? Between justice and injustice? Was it all water under the bridge, flowing into the ocean of oblivion?

  Over a dish of ice cream we discussed how we would have behaved if we’d been born Germans. Adler was interested less in what the Germans had stolen from their victims than in what they had offered them to lure them to their deaths.

  He would tease Skinny. He could, as he put it, live with her.

  “Aren’t you lacking ambition?”

  “What’s that?” She reacted as if an ulcer had burst in her stomach.

  In the field brothel she had had to conceal that she was Jewish and now she would have to conceal that she had been an army whore. She could imagine what a lot of people would throw at her. Did she really have no other way? Did she have to be a whore for the Germans? How was that different from Mr Slâma in their block of flats or the barber who, during the war, had been proud to shave German chins? A lot of people to whom nothing had happened in the war would think that she should have let herself be killed.

  Fortunately, she looked innocent. It was more than likely that she was the only girl from No. 232 Ost who had survived.

  She toyed with the idea of emigrating to some distant country -to America or to Australia. She’d registered for English classes. Then she added Spanish. After three weeks she gave up. It reminded her too much of her father who, at an advanced age, had joined a rapid-study English class.

  We strolled on the wooden bridge over the Vltava River. Trams and cars no longer ran over it, it was now only for pedestrians. It was a pretty bridge and we thought it a pity that it would soon disappear as if it had never existed.

  I asked her why she was so gloomy.

  “Do I seem gloomy to you?”

  “You act as if Adolf Hitler were kissing you.”

  “Adolf Hitler is kissing me.”

  “Who do you think wrote Hitler’s speeches? Did he write them himself?”

  “Your worries!” Skinny exclaimed.

  “Don’t you underestimate it,” Adler said. “It’s one – nil for us.”

  “Ten – nil,” I corrected him.
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  “One – nil is enough,” said Skinny.

  Did Hanka Kaudersovâ derive no satisfaction from the newsreels shown before each film, showing Hitler in a shabby army tunic, pale and wild-eyed, his head twitching and his left arm dangling helplessly? Wasn’t this a long way from 1941, when he believed that he had won the war and so demobilized 40 divisions and ordered industry to start producing peacetime consumer goods? But was it enough to offset Block 18 of the Frauenkonzentrationslager at Auschwitz-Birkenau or No. 232 Ost?

  “Something worrying you?” I asked her, as if I didn’t know.

  “No longer. Not with you. Why?”

  Her eyes seemed to say that this was no business of mine.

  “Your voice sounds as if you were half-buried in snow.”

  There was in fact not a single day when she didn’t return to No. 232 Ost or to the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau … 4 a.m., a frosty night, stars bright. The young should make themselves older and the old younger.

  The duty squad had snatched infants and children from young mothers and flung them on to the cart with the baggage, crutches and rucksacks, but the women screamed for their children. Some of them were saved only because their children got lost in the crush. Others fought their way against the crowd, and half an hour later finished up in the showers.

  “Each man is an island,” she said. She had learnt there to do everything quickly. Eat, walk, run. Not to push into the front row. Not to fall behind. From the wooden bridge she was looking at the surface of the river. By the bank, bubbles were rising from the mud. Now and again a fish would splash. A duck was floating with the current.

  She was amused when they wouldn’t let her into the Kotva cinema to see Ecstasis because she was not yet 18. Needless to say, we smuggled ourselves in. All that fuss because of one nude scene blurred by shrubs? Rottenführer Schratz had seen quite different parades. A thousand girls for five hours in the rain, heat or snow.

  “It’s just like when it rains,” she said. “What can you do? You tell yourself that it won’t rain forever. Or else you find a reason to like the rain.”

  The river glistened and murmured. A little way down from us was the weir, where the water splintered and foamed in the dark. On the hill above there were lights in the windows and above the roofs the stars were shining. Below us the water was flowing, under the bridge and onwards. Three old steamers were anchored by the bank. One of them was being converted into a restaurant and another into an hotel. The third would soon be cleaving the waters of the Vltava again.

  It came to her like a fly that settles on the outside of your window and, before flying away, reminds you of its presence. Did she envy the water for flowing away into the unknown? Did it arouse in her a desire to share its fate? Or else to throw into it what was not so pleasant?

  I watched her, hoping she would not notice. She had a good figure, slim, with an oblong face that remained with me at night when she was not there. Her features, her slim body, her hands and legs aroused in me a longing that was free from desire. Everything I was then yearning for with regard to Skinny was pure – I wanted to take her hand in mine, put my arm round her shoulders, let her put her head on my shoulder or chest – that ineffable feeling from which love springs. She was so pretty, so normal, so healthy.

  “The water, just watching it is doing me good.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “Isn’t it crazy?” she smiled.

  “It suits me.”

  From the river came cool air and a faint smell of fish. Suddenly she shivered and a chill ran down her spine before she laughed.

  “Getting cold? Want to go?”

  “All right.”

  That morning she had met a Czech doctor, aged about 35, who had come back from Buchenwald. As a souvenir, he had brought his striped uniform with him. In 1942 he had supplied his Jewish friends with prescriptions for butter, lard and eggs, tapioca and rice when these were no longer available on ration cards. He offered to examine Skinny.

  All three of us went to see him. He kept Skinny to the last. Adler was in the best shape, just undernourished. With me, the doctor found traces of calcification following rickets. This could be remedied by wine containing iron. He kept Skinny back. She was worried that he might send her for x-rays. For a while she was reluctant even to undress. He saw the tattoo on her belly, and inevitably asked questions. Would he keep it to himself? She pictured people somewhere poking fun at her expense. It worried her.

  Skinny divided people into three categories. The first were those who created the concentration camps and what went with them, and who operated them. These were the Germans and their lackeys. The second group, the largest, were those who did not give a damn, who wanted to live and work, who went along with it, kept their mouths shut and stayed alive, because – and here they were right -one’s life was all anyone had. Finally, the third category, were an infinitesimal minority – those who had the courage to speak up, to stick their necks out.

  She had no wish to see again their former concierge who, when he saw any member of her family in 1942, had crossed the street. His wife had her eyes on the furniture, the carpet, the flower-stand or some picture she might secure from their flat before the officials of the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung got their hands on them. But the Germans made pretty sure that no damned Czech fished their pond dry.

  She had gone to look at their old place in Rybnâ Street. Outside the barber’s hung the same ornamental bowl of gilded tin that had been there when they left. Slavomir Slâma, barber and hairdresser, had his flat behind his salon. He welcomed her, one foot in his shop and the other on the pavement, inviting her to step inside. He would trim her fringe. She would look better than Adina Mandlovâ in Girl or Boy. Instead of the No Admittance to Jews or Dogs he now had plaster busts of President Benes and Marshal Stalin in his window. How were her mother and father? And little Ramon? No doubt all four of them were back again? He would be delighted to give them all haircuts. And no doubt little Ramon would by now also need a shave. In honour of the Liberation the whole Kauders family could have one free visit each. He would clean up Skinny’s neck with a new gadget: Swedish scissors. Sweden had supplied more than guns to the Germans. Perhaps she wouldn’t believe this, but after the attempt on Heydrich’s life he had cut the hair of General Horst Böhme, the chief of police. Two S S officers had stood guard outside his salon. He had sweated, he’d rather not say where. He smiled. It’s all behind us now. We all had our cross to bear.

  On the third floor of the building was a flat occupied by an actor. He’d always had a friendly greeting for everybody. During the war, on the balcony of the National Theatre, he had been presented with the Eagle of Saint Wenceslas. After the war a woman neighbour asked him:

  “Did you have to accept it?”

  He had gaped at her, thinking that the woman should have had enough sense to know that if he hadn’t accepted the decoration he would have been taken that same night to the firing range at Kobylisy.

  The bachelor flat above the actor’s was occupied by a student who, together with some friends, had hidden four girls who escaped from one of the death marches. One of them he hid in the corner of his kitchenette, which he divided off with a curtain. His drinking companions couldn’t understand why he no longer made them welcome. After the war they asked him if he hadn’t been afraid. What was the most dangerous thing about it? That she was so attractive, he said. The Germans tortured nobody more cruelly than those they called White Jews.

  In the street she met one of her teachers from Section L 410 in Terezin. He took her to the Café Demin for a cup of coffee. He asked how she had survived. He bought her a rum baba and said that he would write down her answers.

  Her old teacher waited, his pencil poised over a notepad. How much did she remember of the time before the war? What had she wanted to do before she got to Terezin? What measure had affected her most? The ban on the purchase of fruit and vegetables, including garlic and onions? The ban on being out in
the street after 8 p.m.? The permanent state of emergency where the Jews were concerned?

  “Surely that madness is of no interest to anyone now?” she said. “What do you need to know for?”

  “I’m writing my doctoral thesis on it.”

  He asked her if she was more afraid of the past or of the future. And then came the question: “In Terezin, in Auschwitz-Birkenau or in the camps you were in afterwards, did you do anything you are ashamed of now?”

  An alarm bell rang inside her, and at the same time she felt furious that shame still trailed her like a shadow. She was even a little offended, but was careful not to show it; after all, it was not his fault. He was working on his thesis. When all was said and done, the era behind them had been unique in many respects; he believed that it would not repeat itself, but that it should never be forgotten.

  “Do you have nightmares?” he asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Not afraid of ghosts?”

  “I sleep like a log,” she said.

  “I would like to believe you,” the teacher said slowly. For a moment it occurred to her that he might know all about her. But from whom? The doctor might have gossiped. Any concierge in Prague knew as much as the president or the cardinal. Who, apart from the doctor, had seen her tattoo? She might kick off her blanket in her sleep. Her nightdress might ride up.

  She clenched her fists. After a moment she excused herself, she had to go to the bathroom.

  They stood together in the street for a few minutes. Skinny waited for him to say goodbye. She made her way back to Belgickâ, deep in thought. The teacher had asked her for her address, but she had avoided giving a direct answer.

  She wondered again where she could emigrate. Anywhere she went she might meet people who had survived the camps and had wanted to get as far away as possible from Europe. She would probably run into them even in Tierra del Fuego. Besides, she had heard that Nazis were now getting to Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina; the Vatican alone was said to have obtained more than 5,000 visas for them. Wouldn’t it be a joke if she ran into Sergeant Werner Heinz Ziegler somewhere in the German quarter of Säo Paulo? They could reminisce nostalgically about how far they were from Prague or the Bismarckplatz in Heidelberg.

 

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