by Imre Kertész
EIGHT
I must admit, there are certain things I would never be able to explain, not precisely, not if I were to consider them from the angle of my own expectations, of rule, or reason— from the angle of life, in sum, the order of things, at least insofar as I am acquainted with it. Thus, when they off-loaded me from the handcart onto the ground again, I was quite unable to grasp what I might still have to do with, for instance, hair-clippers and razors. The jammed space, looking at first glance uncannily like a shower room, with its slippery wooden laths onto which I too was deposited amid countless trampling, pressing soles, ankles, ulcerated shanks, and shins—that, by and large, conformed more to my rough expectations. It even fleetingly crossed my mind that, amazing! it seems the Auschwitz custom must be in force here as well. My surprise was all the greater when, after a short wait and a series of hissing, bubbling sounds, water, a copious jet of unexpected hot water, started to gush from the nozzles up above. I was not too pleased, however, because I would have gladly warmed up a little more, but there was nothing I could do about it when, all at once, an irresistible force whisked me up into the air, out of the jostling forest of legs, and meanwhile some kind of big bedsheet and on top of that a blanket were wrapped around me. Then I recollect a shoulder and being draped over it, head to the rear, feet forward; a door, the steep steps of a narrow staircase, another door, then an indoor space, a chamber, a room so to say, where my incredulous eyes were struck, over and above the spaciousness and light, by the well-nigh barrack-room luxury of the furnishings; and finally the bed—manifestly a genuine, regular, single-berth bed, with a well-stuffed straw mattress and even two gray blankets—onto which I rolled from the shoulder. In addition, two men, regular, handsome men, with faces and hair, in white cotton pants and undershirts, clogs on their feet; I gazed, marveled admiringly at them, while they scrutinized me. Only then did I notice their mouths and that some singsong had been humming in my ears for quite some time. I had a feeling they wished to get something out of me, but all I could do was shake my head that, no, I didn’t understand. On that, I heard coming from one of them, but with a most peculiar German accent, “Hast du Durchmarsch?” or in other words, did I have the runs, and somewhat to my surprise I heard my own voice give the answer, hard to know why, “Nein”—I suppose as ever, even now, again no doubt merely out of pride. Then, after a brief consultation and some hunting around, they pushed two objects into my hands. One was a bowl of warm coffee, the other a hunk of bread, roughly one-sixth of a loaf, I estimated. I was allowed to take them and consume them without payment or barter. For a while after that, my insides, suddenly giving signs of life by starting to seethe and become unruly, occupied all my attention and, above all, my efforts, lest the pledge I had given shortly before should in some way be found to have been untrue. I later woke to see that one of the men was there again, this time in boots, a splendid dark blue cap, and a prison jacket with a red triangle.
So then it was up over the shoulder again and down the stairs, this time straight out into the open air. We soon stepped into a roomy, gray timber barracks block, a sort of infirmary or Revier, if I was not mistaken. There’s no denying, I again found everything here, on the whole, to be roughly in line with what I had readied myself for, ultimately completely in order, not to say homely, only now I could not quite fathom the earlier treatment, the coffee and bread. En route, down the entire length of the barracks, I was greeted by the familiar triple tier of box bunks. Each was jam-packed, and a somewhat practiced eye of the kind that I too could lay claim to immediately recognized, on the basis of the indistinguishable tangle of onetime faces, skin surfaces with their blossoming scabies and sores, bones, rags, and scrawny limbs in them, that these must represent at least five and, in one or another, even six bodies per section. Apart from that, I vainly sought for a glimpse on the bare boards of the straw that had done duty as bedding even in Zeitz—but then, true, I had to admit, that was hardly a particularly important detail in view of the brief time that I obviously had to look forward to being there. Then a fresh surprise as we came to a halt, and words, some sort of negotiation—evidently between the man carrying me and someone else—struck my ear. To begin with, I did not know if I could believe my own eyes (but then I couldn’t be mistaken, because the barracks were extremely well lit with strong lamps). Over on the left I could see two rows of regular boxes there too, except the planks were covered by a layer of red, pink, green, and mauve quilts, above which was another row of similar quilts, and between the two layers were poking, tightly packed together, the bald-cropped heads of children, some smaller, some larger, but mostly those of boys of about my own age. No sooner had I spotted all that than they deposited me on the floor, with someone propping me up so that I wouldn’t slump over, took the blanket from me, hurriedly bandaged my knee and hip with paper, pulled a shirt on me, and then I was slipping between a row of quilting, above and below, on the middle tier, with a boy on either side hastily making room for me.
Then they left me there, again without any explanations, so I was once more thrown back on my own wits. At all events, I had to acknowledge that there I was, and this fact undeniably kept renewing itself every second (again), continuing to sustain me anew. Later on I also became aware of a number of necessary particulars. Where I was, for example, was most likely the front, rather than back, of the barracks, as indicated by a door opposite that opened to the outside, as well as by the airiness of the well-lighted space that was to be seen in front of me—an area in which dignitaries, clerks, and doctors moved and worked, and which was even furnished, at its most conspicuous spot, with a sort of table covered with a white sheet. Those who had their shelter in the timber boxes behind mostly had dysentery or typhus, or if they did not have it, then at least they soon would in all certainty. The first symptom, as the unrelieved stench itself indicated, was Durchfall, or Durchmarsch by its other designation, as the men of the bathhouse Kommando had immediately inquired about, and according to which, I realized, my own place would in fact also have been back there, if I had told the truth. I found the daily food allowances and cuisine too, on the whole, similar to those at Zeitz: coffee at dawn, the soup arriving already early in the morning, one-third or one-quarter of a loaf for the bread ration, though if it was one-quarter then usually with a Zulage. The time of day, due to the constantly uniform lighting, unaltered in any way by the window’s lightness or darkness, was more difficult to keep track of, being deducible solely from certain unequivocal signs—morning, from the coffee, the time to sleep, from the doctor’s farewell every evening. I made his acquaintance on the very first evening. I became aware of a man who had stopped right in front of our box. He could not have been all that tall as his head was roughly on the same level as mine. His cheeks were not just rounded but positively plump, even flabby here and there in their abundance, and he not only had a moustache that was twirled in a circle and almost entirely grizzled, but also, to my great amazement— because in my time in concentration camps I had not previously encountered its like—similarly dove gray, a very carefully trimmed beard, a small one in the shape of a dapper spike on his chin. To go with that, he was wearing a large,
dignified cap, trousers of dark cloth, but a prison jacket, albeit of good material, with an armband on which was a red flash bearing the letter “F.” He inspected me in the way that is customary with newcomers, and even spoke to me. I responded with the only sentence of French that I know: “ Dje ne kompran pa, mussiew.” “Ooee, Ooeee,” he said, in an expansive, friendly, slightly hoarse voice, “bon, bon, mo’ fees,” at which he placed a sugar lump before my nose on the coverlet, a real one, exactly the same as the kind I still remembered from home. He then made the round of all the other boys in both boxes, on all three tiers, with a single lump of sugar being dispensed from his pocket to each of them as well. With some he did no more than just place it in front of them, but with others he took longer, indeed a few were able to speak and he made a particular point of patting them
on the cheek, tickling their neck, chattering and jabbering with them a bit the way someone chirrups to his favorite canaries at their regular hour. I also noticed that some favored boys, mainly those who spoke his language, also received an extra sugar lump. Only then did something that had always been preached back at home fall into place, and that was how useful an education can be, most particularly a knowledge of foreign tongues.
I grasped all this, as I say, took it on board, but only in the sense, on the proviso I might almost say, that I was continually waiting meanwhile, even if I could not know specifically for what, but for the denouement, the clue to the secret, the awakening, so to say. The next day, for example, when he must have had the time in the middle of his work with the others, the doctor pointed over to me too; I was pulled out of my place and set down on the table before him. He emitted a couple of friendly tones from his throat, examined me, percussed me, laid a cold ear and a prickly tip of his trim moustache against my chest and back, and gave me to understand, demonstrated, I should sigh then cough. Next he laid me on my back, got an assistant of some kind to take off the paper bandages, and then it was the turn for my wounds. He inspected them initially only from some distance away, then cautiously palpated around them, at which some matter immediately oozed out. At that he muttered something, shaking his head with a concerned air, as if that had somehow made him a little despondent or dampened his spirits, as I saw it. He quickly rebandaged them too, banished them from sight as it were, and I could not help feeling that they could scarcely have met with his approval, for there was certainly no way he could have been reconciled to or satisfied with them.
My examination turned out badly in one or two other respects too, I was obliged to conclude. No way could I make myself understood by the boys lying on either side of me. They, for their part, chatted blithely with one another across me, over or in front of my head, and in a way that made it seem I was merely some obstacle that happened to be in their way. Before that they had inquired as to who and what I might be. I told them: “ Ungar,” and I could hear how that news was spread rapidly up and down the boxes: Vengerski, Vengriya, Magyarski, Matyar, Ongroa, and a great many other variations as well. One of them even called out “Khenyir!” the Hungarian for “bread,” and the way he laughed out loud, to be joined straightaway by a chorus of others, could leave me in no doubt that he had already made acquaintance with my kind, and fairly thoroughly at that. That was unpleasant, and I would have liked somehow to inform them it was a mistake, since Hungarians did not consider me as one of them; that, broadly speaking, I too was able to share that same opinion of them, and I found it very odd, not to say unfair, that it should be me, of all people, who was being looked at askance on their account; but then I remembered the farcical barrier that, to be sure, I could only tell them that in Hungarian, or at best possibly German, which was even worse, I had to concede.
Then there was another shortcoming, a further transgression that, hard as I might try, I could not—for days on end— conceal any longer. I quickly picked up that on those occasions when needs must be attended to, it was customary to summon a boy, hardly older than ourselves, who seemed to be some kind of assistant orderly there. He would appear with a flat, suitably handled pan, which one would thrust under the quilt. Then one had to call out again for him: “Bitte! Fertig! Bitte!”26until he came along to collect it.
Now, no one, not even he, could dispute the justification for such a need once or twice a day; only I was forced to put him to the trouble three and sometimes four times a day, and that, I could see, bugged him—perfectly understandably too, I couldn’t deny it, there’s no question. On one occasion he even took the pan over to the doctor, explained or argued something, showing him the contents, whereupon the latter too mused for a short while over the exhibit, yet for all that, with a gesture of head and hand, unmistakably signaled a rebuff. Not even that evening’s sugar lump was omitted, so everything was all right; I could safely nestle down again amid the undeniable, and so far—to the present day at least—still enduring, seemingly unshakable security of quilts and warming bodies.
The next day, sometime during the interval between coffee and soup, a man from the world outside entered, one of the distinctly rare Prominents, as I immediately realized. His artist’s beret of black felt, his immaculate white smock, and under that trousers with razor-sharp creases, and his footwear of polished black shoes made me slightly alarmed, not merely by the somehow rough-hewn, somehow inordinately masculine, so to say chiseled features, but also by the conspicuously florid, purple, almost flayed impression given by the skin on his face, that seemed almost to expose the raw flesh beneath. Besides that, the tall, burly frame, the black hair with streaks of gray at the temples, the armband that, because he was clasping his hands behind his back, was indecipherable from where I was lying, but above all a red triangle that bore no lettering—all this marked the ominous fact of impeccable German blood. For the first time in my life, incidentally, I could now marvel at a person whose prisoner number did not run in the tens of thousands or even thousands, nor even in the hundreds, but consisted of just two digits. Our own doctor immediately scurried over to greet him and shake hands, give a little pat on the arm, in short win his goodwill, as with a long-awaited guest finally honoring the house with a visit, and to my great amazement, all at once, I could not help noticing, there could be no doubt about it, all the signs were that our doctor must be talking about me. He even pointed me out, with a sweep of his arm, and from his rapid talk, this time in German, the expression “zu dir” distinctly reached my ear. Then, amid explanatory gestures, he plugged away, averring, appealing to the other’s better feelings, the way one proffers and sells an item of merchandise one wishes to dispose of as quickly as possible. The other, having first listened in silence, albeit somehow in the manner of the weightier party, what one might call a tough customer, in the end seemed to be fully convinced, or at least that is what I sensed from the quick, piercing, and already somehow proprietary look of the dark, beady eyes that he darted in my direction, his brisk nod, the handclasp, his entire manner, not to say the satisfied expression that brightened the face of our doctor as the other went his way.
I did not have too long to wait before the door opened again, and in a single glance I had sized up the prison garb, the red triangle containing the letter “P” (the distinguishing mark for a Pole, as was common knowledge), and the word “Pfleger,” which is to say the rank of a medical orderly, on the black armband of the man who entered. This one appeared to be young, maybe twenty or thereabouts. He too had a nice blue cap, though somewhat smaller, from beneath which chestnut hair spilled onto his ears and neck. Every feature on his long but rotund, fleshy face was as normal and pleasant as one could wish, the pink color of the skin, the expression on the perhaps slightly large, soft lips as engaging as you would like: in a word, he was handsome, and I would no doubt have been lost in admiration had he not immediately sought out the doctor and the latter immediately pointed me out to him, and had he not had a blanket over his arm into which, as soon as he had hauled me from my place, he wrapped me, and then, in what seemed to be the customary fashion here, draped me over his shoulder. He did not quite get his own way without let or hindrance, because I clung on with both hands to a strut separating the boxes which happened to be within reach—purely at random, instinctively so to say. I was even a little ashamed of doing so; nevertheless, I discovered the extent to which, it seems, one’s reason can be deceived, how greatly one’s affairs can be complicated by no more than a mere few days of life. Of course, he proved the stronger, and my flailing and pounding on his back and the area around his kidneys with both my fists was to no effect; all he did was laugh that off too, as I could feel from the heaving of his shoulder, so I gave up and let him carry me off to wherever he wanted.
