Fatelessness

by Imre Kertész

  I was virtually already sprawling on the ground before I heard the smack and its force began to sting my left cheek. A man was standing in front of me, in black riding dress from head to toe, with a black beret on his head of black hair, even a black pencil moustache on his swarthy features, in what, to me, was a billow of an astonishing odor: no doubt about it, the sweetish fragrance of genuine cologne. All I could pick out from the confused ranting were repeated reiterations of the word “Ruhe,” or “silence.” No mistaking it, he appeared to be a very high-ranking functionary, which the preeminent low number and green triangle with a letter “Z” on his left breast, the silver whistle dangling from a metal chain on the other side, not to speak of the “LÄ” in white lettering sported by his armband, each in itself, only appeared to reinforce. All the same, I was extremely angry as, after all, I was not used to being hit, and whoever it might be, I strove to give expression—decked though I might be, and if only on my face—to passable signs of that rage. He must have spotted it too, I suppose, because I noticed that even as he carried on with his incessant bawling the look in those big, dark eyes, seemingly almost swimming in oil, meanwhile took on an ever-softer and, in the end, well-nigh apologetic air as he ran them attentively over me, from my feet right up to my face; that was somehow an unpleasant, embarrassing feeling. He then rushed off, people stepping aside to make way for him, in the same stormy haste with which he had materialized just beforehand.

  After I had picked myself up, the neighbor to the right soon inquired whether it had hurt. I said to him, deliberately loud and clear: no chance. “So it won’t do you any harm to mop your nose, then,” he supposed. I touched the spot, and there was indeed red on my fingers. He showed me how I should tip my head back to stem the bleeding, and made this comment about the man in black: “Gypsy,” then, following a brief pause for reflection, as an afterthought: “The guy’s a homo, that’s for sure.” I didn’t quite understand what he was trying to say, and indeed asked him what the word meant. He chuckled a bit and said: “Like—queer!” That clarified the notion a bit better for me, or near enough, I think. “By the way,” he went on to note, stretching out a hand sideways, “I’m Bandi Citrom,” whereupon I told him my name as well.

  He for his part, I later learned, had reached here from a labor camp. He had been conscripted as soon as Hungary entered the war because he had just turned twenty-one: so he was fitted for labor service by virtue of age, race, and condition, and he had not been back home even once in the last four years. He had even been in the Ukraine, on mine-clearing work. “What happened to the teeth, then?” I asked. “Knocked out,” he replied. Now it was my turn to be surprised: “How come . . . ?” But he simply said it was “a long story,” and did not give much else away about the reason. At all events, he “had a run-in with the sergeant of his corps,” and that was when his nose, besides other bones, had been broken: that was all I could get out of him. He was no more forthcoming about the mine-clearing: it took a spade, a length of wire, plus sheer luck, as he put it. That is why very few were left in the “punishment company” at the end, when Germans arrived to replace the Hungarian troops. They had been glad too, because they were immediately offered a prospect of easier work and better treatment. They too, naturally, had stepped off the train at Auschwitz.

  I was just about to take the prying a bit further, but right then the three men returned. About ten minutes before that, more or less the only thing I had registered from what was going on up front was a name, or to be more precise an identical bawl from several voices up front, all yelling out “Doctor Kovács!” at which a plump, dough-faced man, with a head shorn by hair-clippers at the sides, but naturally bald in the middle, shyly, reluctantly, and merely in deference to the urgent call as it were, stepped forward, then himself pointed to another two. The three of them had immediately gone off with the man in black, and only subsequently did the news get back to me here, in the last rows, that we had in fact elected a leader, or “Blockältester”—“senior block inmate”—as they called it, and “Stubendiensts ,” or “room attendants,” as I roughly translated it for Bandi Citrom, since he did not speak German himself. They now wanted to instruct us in a few words of command and the actions that went along with these, which—the leaders had been warned, and they warned us in turn—they were not going to go through this more than once. Some of these—the cries of “Achtung!” “Mützen . . . ab!” and “Mützen . . . auf !”11—I was basically already familiar with from my previous experiences, but new to me was “Korrigiert!” or “Adjust!”—the cap, of course, and “Aus!” or “Dismiss!” at which we were supposed to “slap hands to thighs,” as they said. We then practiced all these a number of times over. The Blockältester, we learned, had one other particular job to do on these occasions, which was to make the report, and he rehearsed this several times over, there in front of us, with one of the Stubendiensts, a stocky, ginger-haired man, with slightly purplish cheeks and a long nose, standing in for the soldier. “ Block fünf,” I could hear him yell, “ist zum Appell angetreten. Es soll zweihundert fünfzig, es ist . . . ,” and so on, from which I discovered that I too must therefore be an inmate of Block 5, which has a roll of two hundred and fifty men. After a few repetitions this was all clear, comprehensible, and could be performed without error, so everyone reckoned. After that, there followed more minutes with nothing to do, and since in the meantime I noticed, on a piece of empty ground to the right of our tent, some sort of mound with a long pole above it and what could be surmised to be a deep trench behind it, I asked Bandi Citrom what purpose it might serve, in his opinion. “That’s a latrine,” he announced straight off after one swift glance. He then shook his head when it emerged that I wasn’t familiar with that term either. “It’s obvious that you must have been tied to Mummy’s apron strings up till now,” he reckoned. All the same, he explained it in a few pithy words, then added something which, to quote him in full, went: “By the time we fill that with shit, we’ll all be free men!” I laughed, but he kept a serious face, like someone who was really convinced, not to say determined, about this. Nevertheless, he wasn’t given the chance to say anything more about that belief, since right at that moment, all of a sudden, there appeared the severe, very elegant figures of three soldiers who were making their way across from the gateway, without haste but obviously very much at ease, at which the Blockältester yelled out, in a voice that acquired a new edge, a keen and screeching timbre that I had not discerned in it even once during the rehearsals: “Achtung! Mützen . . . ab!” at which, like everyone else, me included, he too, naturally, snatched his cap from his head.

  SIX

  Only in Zeitz did I come to realize that even captivity has its mundane round; indeed, true captivity is actually nothing but a gray mundane round. It was as if I had been in a roughly comparable situation already, that time in the train on the way to Auschwitz; there too everything had hinged on time, and then on each person’s individual capabilities. Except in Zeitz, to stay with my simile, the feeling I had was that the train had come to a standstill. From another angle, though—and this is also true—it rushed along at such speed that I was unable to keep up with all the changes in front of and around me, or even within myself. One thing I can say at least: for my own part, I traveled the entire route, scrupulously exploring every chance that might present itself on the way.

  At all events, in any place, even a concentration camp, one gets stuck into a new thing with good intentions, at least that was my experience; for the time being, it was sufficient to become a good prisoner, the rest was in the hands of the future—that, by and large, was how I grasped it, what I based my conduct on, and incidentally was pretty much the same as I saw others were doing in general. I soon noticed, it goes without saying, that those favorable opinions I had heard when still at Auschwitz about the institution of the Arbeitslager must certainly have been founded on somewhat exaggerated reports. As to the entire extent of that exaggeration, and above all the inferenc
es that stemmed from it, however, I did not—nor, in the end, could I—immediately take fully accurate account of this myself, and that was again pretty much what I perceived to be the case with others, indeed I dare say with everyone else, all of the approximately two thousand other prisoners in our camp—the suicides excepted, naturally. But then those cases were uncommon, in no way the rule nor in any way exemplary, everyone recognized. I too got wind of the occasional occurrence of that kind, hearing people arguing and exchanging views about it, some with undisguised disapproval, others more sympathetically, acquaintances with sorrow, but on the whole always in the way of someone striving to form a judgment of a deed that was exceedingly rare, remote to our experience, in some ways hard to explain, maybe slightly frivolous, maybe even slightly honorable, but in any case premature.

  The main thing was not to neglect oneself; somehow there would always be a way, for it had never yet happened that there wasn’t a way somehow, as Bandi Citrom instilled in me, and he in turn had been instructed in this wisdom by the labor camp. The first and most important thing under all circumstances was to wash oneself (before the parallel rows of troughs with the perforated iron piping, in the open air, on the side of the camp over toward the highway). Equally essential was a frugal apportioning of the rations, whether or not there were any. Whatever rigor this disciplining might cost you, a portion of the bread ration had to be left for the next morning’s coffee, some of it indeed—by maintaining an undeflectable guard against the inclination of your every thought, and above all your itching fingers, to stray toward your pocket—for the lunch break: that way, and only that way, could you avoid, for instance, the tormenting thought that you had nothing to eat. That the item in your wardrobe I had hitherto regarded as a handkerchief was a foot cloth; that the only secure place to be at roll call and in a marching column was always the middle of a row; that even when soup was being dished out one would do better to aim, not for the front, but for the back of the queue, where you could predict they would be serving from the bottom of the vat, and therefore from the thicker sediment; that one side of the handle of your spoon could be hammered out into a tool that might also serve as a knife—all these things, and much else besides, all of it knowledge essential to prison life, I was taught by Bandi Citrom, learning by watching and myself striving to emulate.

  I would never have believed it, yet it is a positive fact that nowhere is a certain discipline, a certain exemplariness, I might even say virtue, in one’s conduct of life as obviously important as it is in captivity. It suffices merely to take a little look around the area of Block 1, where the camp’s native inmates live. The yellow triangles on their chests tell you all you really need to know, while the letter “L” in them discloses the incidental circumstance that they have come from distant Latvia, more specifically from the city of Riga, I was informed. Among them one can see those peculiar beings who at first were a little disconcerting. Viewed from a certain distance, they are senilely doddering old codgers, and with their heads retracted into their necks, their noses sticking out from their faces, the filthy prison duds that they wear hanging loosely from their shoulders, even on the hottest summer’s day they put one in mind of winter crows with a perpetual chill. As if with each and every single stiff, halting step they take one were to ask: is such an effort really worth the trouble? These mobile question marks, for I could characterize not only their outward appearance but perhaps even almost their very exiguousness in no other way, are known in the concentration camps as “Musulmänner ” or “Muslims,” I was told. Bandi Citrom promptly warned me away from them: “You lose any will to live just looking at them,” he reckoned, and there was some truth in that, though as time passed I also came to realize it takes much more than just that.

  For example, your first device is stubbornness: it may have come in varying forms, but I can tell you there was no lack of it at Zeitz, and at times it can be of immense assistance, so I observed. For instance, I found out more from Bandi Citrom about that weird band, collection, breed, or whatever one should call them, a specimen of which—on my left in the row—had already somewhat astonished me on my arrival. It was he who told me that we call them “Finns.” Certainly if you ask them where they are from, they really do reply—if they see fit to give you any answer at all, that is—something like “ fin Minkács,” for example, by which they mean they are from Munkachevo, or “fin Sadarada,” which, for example (and you have to guess), is Sátoraljaújhely. Bandi Citrom already knows their organization from labor camp and doesn’t speak very highly of it. They can be seen everywhere, at work, while marching or at Appell , rocking rhythmically back and forth as they unflaggingly mutter their prayers to themselves, like some unrepayable debt. When meanwhile they speak out of the corner of the mouth to whisper across something like, “Knife for sale,” you don’t pay any attention. All the less so, however tempting it may be, especially in the morning, when it is “Soup for sale,” because, however strange it may sound, they don’t touch soup nor even the sausage that we occasionally get—nothing prescribed by their religion. “So what do they live on?” you might well ask, and Bandi Citrom would reply: you don’t have to worry about them, they look after themselves. He would be right too because, as you see, they stay alive. Among one another and with the Latvians they use Yiddish, but they also speak German, Slovakian, and a smattering of who knows what, only not Hungarian—unless it’s a question of doing business, of course. On one occasion (there was no getting out of it), as luck would have it, I ended up in their work Kommando. Their first question was “Rayds di yiddish?” When I told them that, no, unfortunately I didn’t, that was it as far as they were concerned, I became a nonperson, they looked at me as if I were thin air, or rather didn’t exist at all. I tried to speak, get myself noticed, but to no avail. “ Di bisht nisht kai yid, d’bisht a shaygets,”12they shook their heads, and I could only wonder at how people who after all were reputedly at home in the business world could cling so irrationally to something from which the harm to them was so much more, the losses so much greater, than any gains with regard to the end result. That day I learned that the discomfiture, the skin-crawling awkwardness which at times took hold between us was already familiar to me from back home, as if there had been something not quite right about me, as if I did not quite measure up to the proper ideal, in short as if I were somehow Jewish—a rather odd feeling to have after all, I reckoned, in the midst of Jews, in a concentration camp.

  At other times it was Bandi Citrom who slightly amazed me. Whether at work or during a break, I often heard, and quickly learned from him, his favorite song, which he had brought with him from his labor service days in the punishment company: “We clear mines from land in the Uk-raine, / But even there we’re never chicken . . .” was how it began, and I was specially fond of the closing lines, which go: “If a com-rade, a good bud-dy, should be lost, / For those back home our ri-poste / Is: / Come of us what may, / Our dear old home-land, / We’ll not de-ceive you, at any cost.” A noble sentiment, undeniably, and the somber tune, more on the slow side than snappy, along with the ditty as a whole, did not fail to exert their influence on me too, naturally— only somehow they merely jogged my memory of the gendarme, that time back on the train, when he reminded us of our being Hungarian; only in the end, strictly speaking, the homeland had punished them too. I mentioned this to him once, what’s more. He did not come up with any counterargument either, yet he seemed to be just a little put out, even annoyed one could say. On some occasion the next day, though, very wrapped up in something, he again started whistling, humming, and finally singing it as if any recollection of that had been clean forgotten. Another frequently repeated refrain was that he would again “set foot on the pavements of Forget-me-not Road,” that being where he lived back home, and he mentioned the street, even the number of the house, so many times and in so many ways that finally I too knew all its attractions by heart, almost longed to go there myself, even though in my own recollections I actually
knew it only as a fairly secluded backstreet somewhere in the neighborhood of the Eastern Railway Terminal. He often spoke about, evoked, and also reminded me of other places too, squares, avenues, houses, as well as certain well-known slogans and advertising signs that blazed on their roofs and in various shopwindows—“the lights of Budapest” as he called them, though here I had to correct him, being obliged to point out that those lights no longer existed on account of the blackout regulations, and the bombing, to be sure, had knocked the city’s panorama about a bit here and there. He fell silent, but as far as I could make out the news was not very much to his liking. The next day, though, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, he again started to go on about the lights.