by Imre Kertész
I slept through the transfer too, more or less. Prior to that, the news had reached me that in the meantime winter quarters, stone-walled barracks, had been constructed in place of the tents at Zeitz, and among those provision for a hospital had not been overlooked. Again I was tossed onto a truck—judging from the darkness, it must have been evening, and from the cold, sometime around midwinter— and the next thing I made out was a cold, well-illuminated anteroom to some immeasurably vast place, and in the anteroom a wooden tub smelling of chemicals. I was obliged to wash—all complaints, pleading, and protest being to absolutely no effect—to dip myself in it to the crown of my head, which, apart from the coldness of its contents, made me shudder even more since I could not help but notice that all the other sick people—wounds and all—had already immersed in that selfsame brown liquid before me. After which, here too time started to elapse, and in essentially the same manner as at the previous place, with only minor differences. In our new hospital, for instance, there were triple-decker bunks; we were also taken off to the doctor less frequently, and so it was more here that my wound cleared up, in its own way, as best it could. On top of that, not long afterward a pain started on my left hip followed by the now familiar flaming red sac. A few days after that, having waited in vain for it to subside, or maybe for something else to intervene, I was driven, like it or not, to mention it to the orderly, then after renewed urging, some further days of waiting, I finally took my place in the queue for the doctors in the anteroom to the barracks, as a result of which, to go with the incision on my right knee, another, roughly the length of my palm, was made on my left hip. More unpleasantness arose from where I was placed, on one of the lower bunks, since it happened to be directly opposite a tiny, unglazed window that was open to the invariably gray sky and on the iron bars of which the clouds of steaming exhalations in here had probably been responsible for forming permanent icicles with a perpetual coating of furry hoarfrost. All I had to wear, however, was what was issued to patients: a short, buttonless shirt and, with some regard to the winter season, the gift of a peculiar, green-colored woolly cap with circular flaps over the ears and a wedge-shaped protrusion over the brow that, although somewhat resembling the headgear of a speed-skating champion or an actor doing Satan on stage, was nonetheless extremely useful. As a result, I was often freezing, especially after losing one of my two blankets, the tatters of which had, up till then, allowed me to make up quite tolerably for the shortcomings of the other: I should lend it for a short period, so said the orderly, he would bring it back later. Even using both hands, my attempts to hold fast to it were in vain, he proving the stronger; but what rather upset me, besides the loss itself, was the thought that, as best I knew, they generally had a habit of stripping the blankets most frequently off those for whom the end seemed predictable, not to say anticipated. On yet another occasion, a voice that had meantime grown familiar to me, from another lower bunk somewhere behind me, alerted me to the fact that an orderly must have made another appearance, once again with a new patient in his arms, and was in the middle of casting around to see which of our beds he might be deposited on. The gravity of the voice’s case, we learned, and the doctor’s approval entitled him to a bed of his own, and he roared and thundered “I protest!” invoked “I have a right to it! Just ask the doctor!” and again “I protest!” so stridently that the orderlies would indeed, eventually, keep carrying their load on to another bed—my own, for example; which is how I acquired another boy who looked to be roughly my own age as a bunk-mate. The sallow face and large, burning eyes seemed vaguely familiar to me, but then, equally, everyone here had a sallow face and large, burning eyes. His first words were to ask if I happened to have a glass of water, so I told him I wouldn’t mind one myself, and that was followed immediately by: what about a cigarette? and of course he was no luckier on that score either. He offered bread for one, but I made it clear he should drop it, that had nothing to do with it, I simply didn’t have any, at which he fell silent for a while. I suspect he must have had a fever as heat was pouring steadily from his persistently shivering body, from which I was able to take agreeable profit. I was less enchanted with all his tossing and turning during the night, which, to be sure, did not always pay adequate consideration to my wounds. I told him as well: Hey! Cut it out, ease up there, and in the end he heeded the advice. I only saw why the next morning, when my repeated attempts to rouse him for coffee were futile. All the same, I hastily passed his mess tin to the orderly along with my own since, just as I was about to report the case, he snappily asked me for it. I later also accepted his bread ration on his behalf, and likewise his soup that evening, and so on for a while, until one day he began to go really strange, which was when I felt obliged finally to say something, as I could not carry on stowing him in my bed, after all. I was somewhat apprehensive as the delay was by now rather obvious, though its reason— with a mite of acumen, on which I could still draw—seemed easy enough to deduce, but anyway he was taken away with the others and nothing was said, thank goodness, so for the time being I too was left without a companion.
One further thing that I truly made acquaintance of here was the vermin. I was quite unable to catch the fleas: they were nimbler than me, and for a very good reason too, after all, they were better nourished. Catching the lice was easy, only it made no sense. If I grew particularly exasperated with them, all I had to do was run a thumbnail at random over the canvas of the shirt stretched on my back to mete revenge, wreak devastation, in a series of clearly audible pops; yet within a minute I could have repeated it all over again, on the selfsame spot, with exactly the same result. They were everywhere, wriggling into every hidden crevice; my green cap was so infested as to turn gray and all but crawl with them. Still, the biggest surprise of all was the consternation, then horror, of feeling a sudden tickling sensation on my hip and then, on lifting the paper bandage, seeing they were now on my open flesh there, feeding on the wound. I tried to snatch them away, get rid of them, at least root and winkle them out, compel them to wait and be patient at least a little bit longer, but I have to admit that never before had I sensed a more hopeless struggle or a more stubborn, even, so to say, more brazen resistance than this. After a while, indeed, I gave up and just watched the gluttony, the teeming, the voracity, the appetite, the unconcealed happiness; in a manner of speaking, it was as though it were vaguely familiar to me from somewhere. Even so, I realized that, to some extent, and taking everything into account, I could see it their way. In the end, I almost felt relieved, even my sense of revulsion very nearly passed. I was still not pleased, still remained a little bit bitter about it, understandably enough I think, but now it was somehow more generalized, without acrimony, in acquiesing to a degree in nature’s larger scheme, if I may put it that way; in any event, I quickly covered the wound up and subsequently no longer engaged in combat with them, no longer disturbed them.
I can affirm that there is no amount of experience, no tranquillity so perfect, nor any insight of such weight, it seems, as to lead us to abandon yet one more last chance in our favor—assuming there is a way, naturally. Thus, when I, along with all the others on whom it was clear not too much further hope can have been pinned of being set to work again here, in Zeitz, was returned to sender as it were—back to Buchenwald—I naturally shared the others’ joy with every faculty that was left me, since I was promptly reminded of the good times there, most especially the morning soups. However, I gave no thought, I have to admit, to the fact that I would first have to get there, by rail at that, and under the conditions of travel that now implied; in any event, I can tell you there were things that I had never previously understood, indeed would have had trouble in crediting at all. A once so commonly heard expression as “his earthly remains,” for instance, as far as I knew up till then, was applicable solely to someone deceased. For my own part, I could hardly have doubted it, I was alive: even if only guttering and, as it were, turned down to the very lowest mark, a flicker of life n
evertheless still burned within me as they say, or to put it another way, my body was here, I had precise cognizance of everything about it, it was just that I myself somehow no longer inhabited it. I had no difficulty in perceiving that this entity, and other similar entities to its side and above it, was lying there, on the wagon’s jolting flooring, on cold straw so dampened by all sorts of dubious fluids that my paper bandage had long since frayed, peeled, and become detached, while the shirt and prison trousers in which I had been dressed for the journey were pasted to my naked wounds— yet all this was of no immediate concern to me, of no interest, no longer had any impact, indeed I would maintain that it had been a long time since I had felt so easy, tranquil, almost lost in reverie—so comfortable, to be quite frank. For the first time in ages, I was freed of the torments of irritability: the bodies squeezed up against mine no longer bothered me, indeed I was somehow even glad that they were there with me, that they were so akin and so similar to mine, and it was now that an unwonted, anomalous, shy, I might even say clumsy feeling toward them came over me for the first time—I believe it may, perhaps, have been affection. I encountered the same on their part as well. True, they no longer held out much in the way of hope, as they once had. It could be that this—above and beyond all other difficulties, naturally—is what gave rise to other manifestations that could sometimes be heard alongside the general groaning, the hisses from between clenched teeth, the quiet plaints—a word of solace and reassurance—so hushed and yet, at the same time, so intimate. But I can say that those who still had any capacity at all were not remiss in actions either, and when I announced that I needed to urinate diligent hands were merciful to me too by passing on the brass can from who knows how far away. By the time ice-skimmed puddles on paved ground, instead of those on the train’s floorboards, finally came to be under my back—how, when, and by dint of the hands of which person or persons, I have no idea—I can tell you it no longer meant all that much to me that I had arrived safely back at Buchenwald, and I had also long forgotten that this was the place, when all is said and done, that I had yearned so much to reach. I did not even have an inkling where I might be, whether still at the railway station or farther inside; I did not recognize the surroundings, nor did I see the road, the villas, and statue that I still clearly remembered.
In any case, it seemed I must have lain there in that way for some time, and I was getting on just fine, peacefully, placidly, incuriously, patiently, where they had set me down. I felt no cold or pain, and it was more my intellect than my skin which signaled that some stinging precipitation, half snow, half rain, was spattering my face. I mused on one thing and another, gazed at whatever happened to strike my eye without any superfluous movement or effort: the low, gray, impenetrable sky, for instance, or to be more precise the leaden, sluggishly moving wintry cloud-cover, which concealed it from view. Nevertheless, every now and again it would be parted by an unexpected rent, with a more brilliant gap arising in it here and there for a fleeting moment, and that was like a sudden intimation of a depth out of which a ray was seemingly being cast on me from up above, a rapid, searching gaze, an eye of indeterminate but unquestionably pale hue—somewhat similar to that of the doctor before whom I had once passed, back in Auschwitz. A shapeless object right next to me: a wooden shoe and on the other side a devil’s cap similar to mine with, between two jutting appurtenances—a nose and chin—a hollow indentation: a face came into my field of vision. Beyond that were further heads, entities, bodies—what I understood to be the remnants or, if I may use the more precise term, debris of the freight consignment that had presumably been parked here for the time being. Some time later, and I don’t know if it was an hour, a day, or a year, I finally picked out voices, noises, the sounds of work, and tidying up. All of a sudden, the head next to me rose, and lower down, by the shoulders, I saw arms in prison garb preparing to toss it onto the top of a heap of other bodies that had already been piled on some kind of handcart or barrow. At the same time, a snatch of speech that I was barely able to make out came to my attention, and in that hoarse whispering I recognized even less readily a voice that had once—I could not help recollecting—been so strident: “I p . . . pro . . . test,” it muttered. For a moment, before swinging onward, he came to a halt in midair, in astonishment as it were, or so I thought, and I immediately heard another voice—obviously that of the person grasping him by the shoulders. It was a pleasant, masculine-sounding, friendly voice, slightly foreign, the Lager vernacular of the German attesting, so I sensed, more to a degree of surprise, a certain amazement, than any malice: “Was? Du willst noch leben?”25he asked, and right then I too found it odd, since it could not be warranted and, on the whole, was fairly irrational. I resolved then that I, for my part, was going to be more sensible. By then, however, they were already leaning over me, and I was forced to blink because a hand was fumbling near my eyes before I too was dumped into the middle of a load on a smaller handcart, which they then started to push somewhere, though as to where, I wasn’t too inquisitive. Only one thing preoccupied me, one thought, one question that passed through my mind at this moment. It may well have been my fault for not knowing, but I had never had the foresight to inquire about the customs, rules, and procedures at Buchenwald—in short, how they did it here: was it with gas, as at Auschwitz, or maybe by means of some medicine, which I had also heard about, or possibly a bullet or some other way, with one of a thousand other methods of which, having insufficient information, I was ignorant. At all events, I hoped it was not going to be painful; strange as it may seem, this too was just as genuine, and preoccupied me in just the same way, as other, more valid hopes that—in a manner of speaking—one pins on the future. Only then did I find out that vanity is an emotion that, it seems, attends a person right up to their very last moment, because truly, however much this uncertainty may have been nagging me, I did not address any question or request so much as a single word, nor even cast a fleeting glance behind me, to the person or persons who were pushing. The path, however, came to a high bend, and down below a broad panorama suddenly emerged beneath me. The dense landscape that populated the entire vast downward slope stood there, with its identical stone houses, the neat green barracks, and then, forming a separate group, a cluster of perhaps new, somewhat grimmer, as yet unpainted barracks, with the serpentine, yet visibly orderly tangle of inner barbed-wire fences separating the various zones, and farther off a trackless expanse of huge, now bare trees disappearing into the mist. I did not know what a crowd of naked Muslims were waiting for by a building over there, but I did indeed suddenly identify a few worthies who, judging by their stools and busy movements as they sauntered back and forth, were barbers, if I was not mistaken, which meant it must obviously be the day’s intake for the bathhouse. Farther in, as well, the distant, cobblestoned streets of the Lager were also inhabited by signs of movement, languid activity, pottering about, killing time: founder inmates, the ailing, prominent personages, storemen, and the fortunate elect of the in-camp work Kommandos were coming and going, carrying out their everyday duties. Here and there, more suspect plumes of smoke mingled with more benign vapors, while a familiar-sounding clatter drifted up faintly my way from somewhere, like bells in dreams, and as I gazed down across the scene, I caught sight of a procession of bearers, poles on shoulders, groaning under the weight of steaming cauldrons, and from far off I recognized, there could be no doubting it, a whiff of turnip soup in the acrid air. A pity, because it must have been that spectacle, that aroma, which cut through my numbness to trigger an emotion, the growing waves of which were able to squeeze, even from my dried-out eyes, a few warmer drops amid the dank-ness that was soaking my face. Despite all deliberation, sense, insight, and sober reason, I could not fail to recognize within myself the furtive and yet—ashamed as it might be, so to say, of its irrationality—increasingly insistent voice of some muffled craving of sorts: I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp.
