No, even if he couldn’t quite define what the “Jewish soul” was, he knew it existed, and it was too complex and too sensitive to be reduced to a party platform, no matter how well meaning. He might not have been the theoretician they had expected him to be, but he had never been anything less than faithful to the Jewish soul. At least until recently, when everything just wore him down until he no longer seemed to care. And in fact he really didn’t care enough to be angry with God. Not that he believed in the traditional, personal, omnipotent deity. So far as he believed—and it wasn’t very far—he opted for Spinoza’s god, who had created the laws of nature and did not control individual destinies. But now he no longer much cared about anyone’s god, Spinoza’s or anyone else’s. Still, he remembered God’s name; he wished that he could remember his own. Why should he be more solicitous of an ancient god than of himself? He wondered with an irony that lacked sufficient passion for any really tasty bitterness. He would abandon everyone just as God had; instead, he turned to the steel rails—parallel, precise, enduring, and leading away from the Warsaw ghetto.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
DZIKA AND STAWKI STREETS. OTHERS FEARED THE umschlagplatz, but it was all right with him. He was going to meet the train. Like the parallel metal bands of track that connected the distant horizons, trains seemed to run through the great moments of his life, from the station at Sufnitz to the umschlagplatz here in the Warsaw ghetto.
And he met the train.
The German hosts herded their parasitic guests through a gate in the barbed wire to an adjacent compound and from there into the cattle cars. Having overstayed their welcome, the guests did not resist; indeed, rather apologetically they accepted their hosts’ impatient directives to terminate their loitering at Dzika and Stawki Streets. Even after the carriages were full, they assented to their hosts’ insistent wish that they continue to enter. For their part, to communicate their seriousness, the hosts shoved, beat, and kicked them. Considering the duration of the guests’ stay, a millennium give or take a century, their forced removal went very well.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
UNLIKE THE OTHERS INSIDE THE CATTLE CAR, HE HAD all the air he needed. Still, he could not breathe because everyone else was behind him, pressing pitilessly against his back, which in turn painfully crushed his chest against the slats.
Outside—on the far side of the ghetto—he could distinctly hear the guard dogs barking. Raucous and agitated, they hoarsely trumpeted the frustration of abandoning the hunt. The turbulent stampeding merriment of loading the prey had cruelly stimulated their instinctual desires. They were of good stock, well-bred, finely disciplined, and their clamor demonstrated the primitive vigor of their purpose.
Inside, he envied their deep-throated, full-lunged call, almost Wagnerian in its bold, robust spirit. He wondered whether there would be such performances at the destination in the East. The German shepherds seemed so deeply representative of the West he was leaving that it was hard to imagine them in the East. One had to admire their tireless efficiency. Could the East produce such spirited wonders?
Before he could begin to imagine an answer, a highpitched voice inside the train car began to howl in a wild instinctual shriek of sustained pain. From his stay in the ghetto, he knew that such cries of terror were raised in pitch, so that one could not discern whether the source was a man or woman. In the small confines of the car the sound reverberated with the fierceness of a siren. Despite the pain it caused the ear, it generated very little opposition, for it gave voice to the others’ suffering. Moreover, the residents of the Warsaw ghetto had experienced enough suffering to understand that nothing could be done about such a shriek from the depths of one’s being—or as the religious would have it, from the soul when it was leaving the body. He did not admire the energy of the scream; he, too, recognized it as a final sound announcing the death of an organism, like the flash of the flickering wick before its abrupt dark death. He passively listened instead to the will to live draining from a body. It continued for an astonishingly long time. So long, in fact, that it seemed to voice more than the suffering of the one cattle car of the one train. It seemed to articulate the death of the Jewish world itself, as if, he thought, the vault of the sky were a baby’s behind and the skin was being stripped off with brutal precision.
A few years ago, even one year ago, he was certain that such a cry would be heard from one end of the world to the other; now he knew that it was muffled by a few score bodies inside the decrepit cattle car, and that outside, the barking of the guard dogs rendered it unintelligible. He couldn’t be upset about that; even he preferred the beasts’ ravenous call to this lamentable wail; they had the creative energy of the hunt. At least Western dogs moved forward. All the East did was wail into the grave. And he didn’t even have enough spirit to do that while the dome of the Jewish heaven was flayed alive. Did Zigelboym know?
As the screaming cry diminished, he identified the voice as that of a woman. The shriek started to rise again, only to tail off abruptly into sobs of no great distinction.
Almost as an afterthought, someone bothered to explain, “It’s for her child.”
Another disembodied voice, equally weary, from somewhere behind him in the car asked rhetorically, “They took him from her?”
“No,” came the equally logical reply of one facing resettlement in the East. “Because he’s still with her. She couldn’t leave him behind.”
Silence in the car. He welcomed the uninterrupted barking of the dogs. It was so blissfully unambiguous.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE DAY WORE ON. HE STOOD, STUFFED BESTIALLY INTO the cattle car. No, not even beasts were shipped to slaughter like this; they would die on their journey and lose their market value. But a Jew had no market value, so in the car they crushed one another: elbows, knees, heads, piercing another’s calves, backs, stomachs, sides, every man and child receiving, transmitting, radiating pain, like raindrops striking a pond. Agonies of discomfort crossed the car, reaching those packed against the sides of the carriage. Like a true wave striking a barrier, the pain fell back on itself recrossing the pool. Those mashed against the wall—he was one of them—were the boundary. Although they could originate pain, they could only transmit in one direction. Of these marginal people they were quite literally the most marginal, not fully resonating to their fellows’ suffering. On the other hand, they had more air to breathe, and during daylight hours they might even manage a few rays of sunlight, provided of course they weren’t crushed to death while enjoying their marginal benefits. The slatted sides built to house Polish cattle and swine were even less relenting than the bony jaws, pointed limbs, and other anatomical instruments of group torture.
What could a Jew lose in this situation that he had not lost already? His life? But it had no market value! What was left? What should have been left? Only the dignity of his name, and he himself had forgotten that. He felt as if he were collaborating with the Nazis. They were bad enough, one didn’t have to help them. He had been forgetting his name more and more frequently, for longer and longer periods. Now he seemed to have forgotten it altogether. He had slight hope of remembering; he had begun dreaming of his boyhood town, Krimsk. At first he had assumed that he was subconsciously associating the hunger of Warsaw’s ghetto with the deprivation of his youth, as if in some way the stomach sat on memory. He had assumed that a full stomach smothered memory, suppressing its activity.
He had naively thought that the emptiness of his stomach would be compensated for by the fullness of memory, but it was more complex than that. And wasn’t he a great one for discovering complexities! For reveling in them! His hunger seemed to stimulate sense areas of his memory and simultaneously to repress others—what was his name!
At night he dreamed of the small leather shop in Krimsk. He could even smell the cracked leather harnesses, the dark sticky glue. A father, a mother, a brother, a sister, called him by name in the night. By day they became pale shadows, mute flicke
ring images, and he could not remember his name. When he squinted to catch the name printed on the shop’s door, all he could make out was the fretwork of his own eyelashes, and fuzzily at that. He didn’t remember his name.
Indeed, he had thought of taking advantage of those periods when he did know his name to sew it into his coat or write it on a piece of paper to be carried in his pants pocket, but that would only have added to his indignity: a fifty-eight-year-old man—yes, he remembered his age—reduced to the ultimate image of the juvenile refugee with a cardboard name placard draped around his neck. And added to his anxiety, too; it was difficult enough to keep the shirt on your back when it didn’t contain your identity. Your name was supposed to be something no one could take away, and he had surrendered his.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
WHEN THE TRAIN STARTED MOVING, THE CLICK OF THE wheels came through the uninsulated floor slats with a quick, sharp rhythm that reminded him of his youthful departure from Krimsk. He had hitched a ride with the junkman Boruch Levi in his wagon, to Sufnitz. The Krimsker Rebbe had spoken harsh words to him, and he had found it ironic and appropriate that he should leave Krimsk accompanied by junk. At Sufnitz he had boarded the coach, and as they pulled away from the station, he sat in his long frock coat, hugging the box of books on his knees. He clutched it tightly, for he felt as if he were flying. The telegraph poles rushed to greet him and fled with equal alacrity to give others a chance to welcome and bless him. “Mazel tov,” they greeted him; “Welcome to the world.” The click of the wheels, however, as the train sped toward Warsaw, convinced him that he had entered a new level of being. The modern world had its own twentieth-century language—precise, rhythmic, and metallic. Romantic that he was, he had imagined that all mechanical encounters had a lyric bent, enthusiastic and heraldic, like birds chirping at dawn.
And now forty years later in the cattle car, herded like a beast on the way to the slaughterhouse, he heard the modern language again through the bestial slats. Somehow, for all its certainty—so very precise—his death seemed a distant event. He had always lacked the more normal imagination. His hysterical mother possessed it, and she was right; this train was carrying her son to his death. He knew it, too, but it seemed strangely distant, veiled in the future. Even in the most peaceful years, he could never visualize his own personal life. Somehow he always seemed inchoate and incapable of further individual development, a partial person. Sometimes he had thought that he might have grown if he could have found a more complete environment. How could anyone learn to swim by just looking at the water? One had to go into it, immerse oneself in it. Since he felt incomplete, he couldn’t marry; that would have been unfair to any woman. If he didn’t know who he was, how could he ask anyone to share his fate? There were women, attractive and intelligent, who wanted him. They found him sensitive, intelligent, and unfailingly polite. They also found him caring, but in that they were wrong, or if not wrong, somewhat misled. He did want to care, but indeed, his limitations meant that he cared in a limited way, and he knew very well that caring was something that should not be subject to restraints.
He wondered about the world, he wondered about the Jews, and he wondered about himself in a most unrestrained manner, never drawing any hard conclusions but loving his speculative inquiries—always balanced. Since that intellectual balance wasn’t life, he remained a marginal personality with many friends. Some of them wondered why he didn’t marry, and others wondered why he didn’t commit his prodigious talents to one of the causes that interested him. Ironically, his ability to visualize the future of an institution or a party made it impossible for him to join wholeheartedly in any such ventures.
When he left Krimsk, his mother had wept; his father, too, but still he had left, and he had rejoiced at the click of the train steaming along the tracks away from his boyhood home. Now, some wept and some didn’t, but no one rejoiced.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE ROUTINE CLICK OF THE WHEELS ALONE, RISING through the open slats of the cattle car, would have been overwhelming, but one wheel wasn’t working as it should. A thrashing, almost cannibal gnashing of steel devouring steel became deafening. It wasn’t an even contest. How could it be? The maimed wheel, for all its turning, couldn’t escape the track. The noise obliterated one’s ability to think. Who could exist within such a pounding, beating roar? It was enough to make you forget who you were. In this he had an advantage over his fellow sufferers.
They left Warsaw accompanied by the crashing of the uneven, asymmetrical wheel. The more they traveled, the more lopsided the wheel became, until along with the terrible thumping din, their teeth rattled and their bones ached from the vibrations. Gathering speed, the train progressed into the countryside; all the while the physical abuse increased as the wheel degenerated—blow by blow, ceaselessly pounding. To him it seemed the purposeful extension of Nazi logic: there can be no limit either to Nazi vigilance or to the affliction of the devil-Jew. First you starve the Jew, then you imprison his dispirited body in an overcrowded railroad car, and finally, for good measure, you shackle the train itself with a flat wheel. Always the Nazis are thorough. Always the Nazis are teachers; let the Jews learn from the pitiless destruction of the chosen wheel. Fatigued, feverish, disintegrating, forced to turn, the wandering Jewish wheel perpetually encounters the fresh, cool, endlessly unrelenting Nazi track.
They prayed that it would stop, but it did not. Ceaseless, the insufferable pounding. His ribs ached; his head bounced off the swaying side of the tortured carriage. Ceaseless, the insufferable became sufferable. His ribs became numb. His head, a spherical appendage of the car, a harmless rattle in the noisy charge of the train into approaching darkness in the East. Behind him in the West, the shameless naked sun plunged below the horizon in a splash of brilliant bloodred rays. Inside the carriage they were shielded from only this natural obscenity and no other.
Ceaseless, ceaseless, and then the miracle occurred. The train stopped. At first the miracle went unrecognized. The memory of the din continued to echo in their ears, reverberating as loud as the original sound. The train sat still on a siding, but their bodies continued to suffer, experiencing real agony in a phantom journey.
As their senses returned, so, too, did their pain, and so, too, their voices. Moans filled the dark car as agony spoke, its voice surprisingly sweet, surprisingly gentle. A soft cloud of torture hovered above them in the tomblike car, tantalizing them with the forlorn illusion that their journey had ended. They had broken through and crossed a barrier of pain, but geographically Dzika and Stawki Streets with their spacious, light, airy holding yards could not be many kilometers behind. Although they had not entered the East, clearly they had left the West forever. As if to emphasize the irrevocability of their departure, the sun hurriedly buried itself beneath the horizon, leaving the still train in a thick vein of darkness.
In the woods alongside the track, crickets began their nervous, insistent, conversational twitter. At irregular intervals singular, deep-voiced bullfrogs hiccupped their soliloquies of rapture and appetite into the night. Birds’ wings stirred the close, blind air, their chirps and trills telling of darting and sailing not far beneath the stars. Had any of these creatures, or even the stars themselves, stopped to listen to the alien carriage parked in their midst, they would have thought it a phantom train. Black, motionless, slumbering in the middle of nowhere, it emitted dull, cooing, dovelike moans, the effluvia of former lives. Pinioned in slow, dark pain to the rough boards, he would have agreed, imprisoned in his suffering body, his tortured flesh crushed in the vise of other bodies, all locked into the immuring cell of the cattle car. Motionless, the cars imprisoned between the insensible parallel prison rails. The entire train shrouded without by the cool night and permeated within by a warm miasma, so that it was impossible to lift even a finger.
Frozen in the confining matrix, his face sagging against the wooden slats, he felt that the cool night air only inches from his parched face was impossibly distant
, incapable of providing him with breath. Phantoms cannot use fresh, cool air. Only the soft cloud of torture, inches above their heads, sustained them. Only that poisonous cloud was capable of motion and therefore of nurture. This moist creation drew from them, as if by evaporation, the shed and unshed tears of their own sorrow, the heat of their hearts, the soft soughing of their breath, their very life force. As they stood motionless, their lives ebbing away, the cloud seemed to condense sufficient traces of dewlike, life-giving nurture to sustain them. The exchange was poisonous, for they were all losing more than they received; nevertheless, it seemed to sustain them. They even valued it, as the only nurture they had. They found the poisonous vapors soft, sweet, alive, and life giving. And illusory as it was, they were right, for without it, they would have expired even more quickly.
A phantom cloud sustained phantoms. When he heard voices in the thick vapors behind him in the car, he knew that the miasmal cloud had provided the energy. It therefore came as no surprise that they were phantom voices, last season’s uprooted corn shocks drifting against each other in a slight wind: dry, rattling, accidental echoes of lives once lived.
Exhausted, parched by thirst, he paid no attention to them. Disembodied phantoms could not be expected to alleviate thirst or hunger. Jewish phantoms could be expected to complain, and he didn’t need disembodied spirits for that. He heard them talking in scratchy whispers, as if there could be no substantial voice without a body. As they spoke, they seemed to find their voices. What first attracted his interest was their tone. The phantoms seemed to be disputing some point or other. This wasn’t at all like phantoms, and it drew him to their exchange. One voice was questioning. Had it had more energy, it would have been cross-examining, but it was exhausted. For all its desultory persistence—it paused before pursuing its line of inquiry —it seemed the voice of the inferior phantom. The socially superior answering voice acknowledged the right, even the duty, to question. Because of their mutual weariness and shared assumption of inquiry, their discourse seemed to fall somewhere between discussion and debate.
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