The Inventory: A Novel

by Gila Lustiger

  Eight women have to sleep in each.

  Do seven to eight, let us call it seven and a half, women fit in a two-meter-wide and two-meter-long bunk?

  They will simply squash each other a little, they will grow thinner by the day anyway and take up less space.

  For one thousand women have to fit in a barrack and get out of it when it is time for work or for the selection. Even in the gas chamber, you are squeezed up to your neighbor, only on the gallows do you have sweet isolation.

  Labor Jew 468752 takes up a bit more space because she is a fresh arrival and is therefore rounder than the old inmates, who are on familiar terms with death and can smell like tracker dogs that 468752 is one of those who will soon wander up the chimney, one whose number will easily make it onto the death list, because she now has a defect.

  Something has broken in her, so she cannot be used to her full capacity and therefore is not profitable according to the hard rules of market economics: a female working machine that does not function at full power is to be removed from the effective ones in the camp and therefore run through the kidneys.

  She should certainly not think that she can be granted five centimeters more space so that she can rock from side to side because her soul is momentarily in torment. Because her two children, little Dani who occasionally, fairly often recently, wets his bed, and darling Beni who paints such beautiful pictures with a sun and a house and a tree, pictures that they gave as presents to Granny, who hung the framed picture of the tree with the red apples up in her living room — in which someone else was now sitting. Because Beni, her oldest, and Dani, little Dani with the curly hair, are now ashes in a crematorium oven. Because the children, whom she had painfully brought into the world and brought up and at whose beds she had sat on so many evenings to sing them songs and tell them stories or simply to wait until the witch had flown away on her broomstick and had smoothed their foreheads; because the children she had taught to walk and how to say the alphabet, and to add and subtract; because the children, who were her joy and her sorrow, when Beni had that high fever, and Dani had broken his arm, are not there anymore.

  Because they died before her, because she has outlived her little boys, because her children have asphyxiated, because they are dead, because quite simply they are no longer alive. And she could do nothing, and she was not there to hold their hands and to silence their cries with a last kiss, and to hold them to her, and to ease the act of dying, and she was not there, no, she was not there.

  Oh, Frau Kahn, Frau Kahn, if your husband could see you now, qualified real estate agent, underpaid plumber on the run, now number 547811, who is thirsty because he has not drunk anything for three days, and for three hours has been lugging sacks of coal — because he not only has to pay for the death of the children and the imminent (everyone is agreed on that) demise of his wife, but also for that of Herr Kahn: if he could see you like this now, what would he say?

  The Coral Necklace

  ONE OF THE WOMEN STRENG HAD IN HIS PROTECTION for a short time was the German Jew Vera Lipmann. When she was committed she had just completed her twenty-first year of life. A few days after her arrival at the camp, during a selection, she was ordered neither to walk to the left nor to the right, but, as an object possibly worth channeling further, to march straight on toward the chimney, from which the thick gray smoke belched day and night, whose sickly-sweet smell spread over the heads of the prisoners and guards and settled on their clothes.

  Vera drew the attention of the doctor, who had shown his predilection several times for skillfully crafted objects of art and for that reason had granted some women a week or even a month, when she came up to him during a break with an already crossed-off prisoner and a coral necklace. In contrast to the stroma just chipped off the reef, it was deep red in color and perfect in form.

  “Where did you get it then?” asked the doctor, who recognized its worth immediately, and was surprised by her specialized knowledge when Vera replied that it was an Italian piece from the last century, named after the first woman to wear it, the fair Beatrice.

  “It belonged to my grandmother on my father’s side,” said Vera.

  Encouraged by the doctor’s interest, she told him of her request. Immediately upon her arrival in the barracks she had discovered her cousin, ten years her senior. She was to be killed as she had grown too weak to work. She hoped to buy her free with this family heirloom she had smuggled into the camp.

  “She is already struck off the camp lists,” said the doctor, putting the necklace into his pocket, pointing to Else Kahn, who followed the discussion dumbly, “but I want to save you.”

  Vera collapsed weeping and after being separated from her cousin, was assigned with another woman, a Hungarian with high cheekbones and hair that gleamed red in the morning sun, to the brothel. On arrival, she was given a meal of soup, two potatoes, and bread, and after eating her fill was taken to be tattooed. Then she saw Karl Streng.

  As he immediately noticed the value of the young woman in spite of her soiled clothing — she had a delicate, almost childlike body, particularly highly estimated by some customers — he entered Vera in the square notebook in which he listed his stock, but left her in peace because new supplies were treated considerately by him.

  When after the first week Vera had still not declared herself ready to begin, Streng, who made it a general rule not to use force to persuade any of his women to practice their profession, lost his patience, and energetically tapped the as yet unwritten page of his book in which next to the name, age, and number of his protégée, he entered her weekly intake.

  “Yes, yes,” said Vera, “I know what you want,” and began to cry.

  “There is no point,” replied Streng, who had more life- and camp-experience than the young lady, “You have to do it anyway.” He patted her shoulder soothingly, told her to be brave, and, after asking a woman to prepare Vera, paved the way for the first rendezvous.

  That very afternoon Streng found a suitable client. He would have been handsome if it had not been for his hard glinting eyes like raw emeralds in his emaciated face, which lent him something uncanny.

  It had to be. He accepted the voucher and led him to the first floor. There Vera lay, merry as could be and almost unconscious with a half empty bottle of Polish vodka, waiting in a dressing gown for her client.

  Three weeks later as Streng was looking through the peephole to make sure all was well, he noticed the first red blotches on the white back of his whore. When he called her to him and ordered her to undress, Vera collapsed in tears at his feet and begged that he keep her; a referral to the infirmary meant death.

  Streng regarded the woman, whom he did not want to touch and — as she had desired just a few weeks earlier — who would never be touched again by any man, with compassion in his eyes.

  “My poor child,” he said, “my poor, little child,” wrapped the shaking body in a blanket, and sent Vera upstairs. Then he reported the typhus-ridden whore and thus signed her sentence.

  Although he no longer feared death, and though he had grown unfeeling — albeit not harsh — with his women and seldom listened to their complaints of brutal clients and insufficient food, he was really hard hit by Vera’s handover.

  “She is so sweet,” he said, and had to think of his boyfriend who had been so young and pretty. All the years of life Vera and Peter could have had. It was a crying shame. He shook his head and found comfort only in the thought that what she and he and all the other camp internees had of life could not necessarily be considered worth living.

  Vera was taken to Block 25. Her appearance quickly altered. Her face grew thin. The cheekbones stuck out, her eyes were sunken hollows. She still fought it, and chewed long on the slice of bread she held in both hands to prevent a stronger person wrestling it from her, and drank the soup to muffle her hunger in small slurping mouthfuls.

  Often Vera’s thoughts turned to her mother, to her throaty laugh, to the holidays in the mountains
, to the spicy smell of the earth and the heavy hands of her father stroking her head as she fell asleep. These memories comforted her. One week later, when she was spared from the selection, she believed everything could still work out fine. That was the start of her rapid and painful decline.

  From now on, as superfluous human material whose life would anyway be extinguished soon, Vera was marked for death by starvation and only got a small part of the ration apportioned to the prisoners.

  She wept. Since after a few days she did not have any strength left, even the tears stopped. Within the course of just two weeks, through constant diarrhea, she lost a third of her body weight. On her eyelids, feet, thighs, bottom, and arms blisters broke out, which subsided if the auxiliary pressed them. Although only twenty-one, she developed the wrinkled appearance of an old lady.

  “Please,” she begged, whenever anyone approached her bed, “please, a little bread.” But she continued to get only the ration meant for those chosen for starvation.

  She started to have strange visions. She saw the faces of auxiliaries and doctors who bent over her critically and followed her condition with interest, with a red halo of light around them.

  Vera tried to quell the constant emptying of her body by drinking, but she couldn’t keep anything in her stomach and shook with cold. In a state of half-sleep came comfort-bringing dreams.

  On a Saturday — Vera had now been in the infirmary for almost three weeks — she tried to get up and collapsed next to the wooden bed. An auxiliary put her back up. She learned from him that she was to be selected the next day.

  That night Vera did not sleep. With the help of a new arrival who still had some strength she made it to the window and, since she could no longer stand, sat down on the stove.

  There she stayed until dawn, looking at the starless sky that offered her no answers.

  In the morning, during the course of a selection, she was chosen for extermination by the same doctor who had sent her to the brothel a few weeks earlier but now did not recognize her.

  Vera looked out of the window. A fine morning mist lay over the barracks. Everything was still. Only a guard stood smoking outside. She listened to the doctor discussing the technical details of her death with the auxiliary. She turned around. A light had been lit over the table. The doctor arranged the syringe and scalpel on the medical trolley, then stepped back into the shadow. Vera trembled all over and saw the auxiliary coming toward her. She was lifted up and felt a light pressure on her hip.

  Vera thought about her father, who carried her up to bed when she had been overcome by darkness. Softly he had hummed tunes to her and rocked her to sleep. She felt the cold table top. The light was glaring. Vera turned her head to the side and looked at the doctor standing in the corner, waiting. Then she closed her eyes.

  The Final Balance

  BUT WHAT WERE THE OTHERS DOING THAT DAY?

  Fräulein Barbara Dahl stretched, turned to her side, and reached for a slice of whole-grain bread spread with cheese and topped with radishes. Her friend had prepared it for her before going off with the children to her family, and it was now next to a glass of milk on her bedside table. She pulled the covers up, took the magazine that had awarded her first prize — she had saved the magazine for the weekend — and after skipping past the fourth installment of “Brown Soil” turned to the column dedicated to beauty.

  Otto Wagner was asleep.

  His sister set the breakfast table and after putting on the water for coffee went down to the cellar, returning a few minutes later with a jar of plum compote.

  The divorced Frau Wagner drew back the heavy curtains, opened the window, and looked out at the meadow that stretched as far as the adjacent pine forest, gleaming in the first light of day, breathed in the country air with its smell of rain and fresh grass and damp rich earth, and contemplated what she should wear to the party Paul Raeder the real estate agent was hosting.

  Her former bedfellow, the dramaturge Johannes Schellenberg, was dreaming of Italy.

  Paul Raeder was standing with a stopwatch in front of the delivery entrance of his newly acquired department store, which was no longer called O.B. but instead Raeder’s Shopping Arcade, and checked how much time the apprentices needed to unload the goods.

  The gymnast Gerta Berg was helping Harald Hartmund take down the tent. He had gotten up before her, even beating dawn. Now she was holding the rope tight while he pulled the last peg out of the ground with a jerk. She was yawning loudly and at length after staying up late into the night celebrating the fiftieth birthday of a clown.

  The former numismatist Blumenfeld was standing in front of the Australian embassy with his cousin Alfred, because it was no longer safe on the French Riviera. He wanted to emigrate with Pierrette, the housekeeper, his cousin Alfred, his wife, Eva, and Eva’s little niece Andrea, who cried every night because Daddy and Mommy Feigenbaum had landed in a concentration camp.

  Since he would have to wait for some time, he unpacked his rye sandwiches filled with tuna fish, tomato, salt, and egg over which Pierrette, who had been sharing his bed for a year, had trickled olive oil as was her habit, and she could not change.

  After handing over a sandwich to his cousin he took out his chessboard.

  Meanwhile Pierrette was placing a fresh bouquet of anemones on the living-room table and then waking up the child.

  Blumenfeld’s acquaintance, the numismatist Dr. Heillein, who had purchased a considerable part of Blumenfeld’s collection, has become propaganda leader of his district. He is lying back propped up by an extra cushion behind his back and preparing the lecture he is to hold at the primary school the next day. “Bleeding Frontiers, the Enslavement of Germany: The Jew Is Capitalizing on the German Plight.” That is to be the subject matter, to be continued a week later with “Adolf Hitler and the German Uprising.”

  Oswald Blatt, son of the village teacher, made off just before the graduating exam. He did not want to be beaten up anymore for pedagogical reasons and has now become, among other things, a messenger in a ministry, which he keeps quiet, however.

  Frau Pfeifer was cursing. Her sons had not even bothered to put the dirty dishes in the sink, presenting an appealing sight first thing in the morning when she entered the kitchen still half asleep in her dressing gown.

  Her eldest son had fallen in the war for the sake of the Fatherland and final victory.

  Her second son had also suffered a tragic death: he had fallen from a tank during an exercise and broken his neck. Not even a hero’s death that could have filled the members of the family with pride.

  The second youngest was still in bed, having a wet dream. No one took offense. Little Karl was to be called up soon, too.

  The youngest was waiting for all to grow still in the bed next to him, for he did not want to disturb anyone although he desperately needed to go to the bathroom.

  Werner Eckstein was reading a novel, Hero in the Thick of Night.

  Shame, he thought, for the Wehrmacht soldier had managed to rescue the woman from the clutches of the Jewish debaucher so she could faint calmly before he could rape her.

  Werner’s former classmate Uhland had told too many jokes and had been sent to a concentration camp, where he had just exchanged a silver fountain pen for a fat slice of sausage.

  Werner’s mother was cooking cabbage.

  His father was drinking a beer. Too early, many would say. Too early, Herr Eckstein.

  The former baker Uhland was sleeping off his intoxication in the police station. His poor mother had died shortly after his enforced sterilization. Now there was no one to prohibit his drinking. That he had not been done away with was a mystery to everyone.

  Herr Mehler, arrested because of his homosexual activities, was working in Buchenwald in the shoe workshop and stretching the boots of the camp commander. He no longer thought about his wife, but instead thought of his children very often.

  The union leader Ulrich Tilling was back in prison. High treason. Four years this
time.

  His brother Volker sought to comfort his mother and prepared some sandwiches. They were planning a trip to the country to distract his mother from her brooding.

  Police constable Erich Hagel was still in bed. His uniform was hanging on the door. He had been clever enough upon his release not to go to the SA but to go straight to the SS. He was now first officer and was sure to make it to staff officer by next year — eliminating Ella Feigenbaum had opened many doors to him.

  Ernst Fuchs stood up straight and hoped that the SS man would pass over him this time, too, without looking at him. He was hungry and scared.

  Peter was also hungry, and put his new model airplane up on the shelf, although he had not started painting it yet. Then he went into the kitchen and let his mother, the pussycat, pour the still-warm ersatz coffee into his cup.

  His father was in the bathroom. After the story with stupid Anna he had stopped smoking and was generally not as communicative as before.

  Herr Rößler, three months after he had been informed, with the heartfelt sympathy of the doctors and the employees of the institute, of the loss of his daughter and told to find consolation in the knowledge that the death of his daughter had released her from her severe, incurable sufferings — her death was brought about by an phenol injection directly in the heart — swallowed two bottles of sleeping pills. For he had not found any consolation and had to think of Anna continually and therefore, at the time at which we have to conclude, he was already dead.

  Dead, too, were:

  Klara Fuchs and her son David.

  Käthe Simon, formerly Fuchs, and Ernst Simon, her husband.

  Otta Fuchs and her mother.

  Reinhard, Dora, and Hermann Lipmann, last residents in Buchenwald.

  Reinhardt Aunt Helene and her husband Leo, who in spite of his numerous brochures, written in his free time, never managed to convince the German citizens of Christian belief that he and his fellow German citizens of Jewish belief were not subhumans to be exterminated.