by Martin Amis
* * *
There are poems to Rosa, which he takes from the trash. They are brought in the wicker wastepaper basket by bowing Lourdes. Never more than two or three lines long.
The soul of a princess in her gypsy rags,
Doomed to fret in her humble stall …
And:
Rosa, whose innocence asks to be saved!
Where the knight who will deliver her?
Yeah. Where the knight. These lines of his he moodily and sometimes tearfully erases with his pen—a good image, perhaps, of his chronic diffidence.
His body now exudes this pink gook which he subsequently bottles and gives to the Agent together with a bunch of other toiletries.
When he goes out there to wait for her in the evening, I sometimes think: It isn’t Rosa. It’s the camp he loves. The fierce and sentimental music and the ignorant colors, the prettiness and the disease under the fake-gold light, the tuberculosis and syphilis, the fires showing through the branches like illuminated brains, the glamorous nomas of eye and mouth, the childishness and all the valueless trash. He wants to do something to the camp. What? Here in Portugal he pretends not to be a doctor, probably wisely, and steers well clear of anyone who is sick or injured, Lourdes with her dramatic fevers or Tolo knock-kneed with gout, even Rosa’s scrapes and sprains. He leaves it to the local man: the local man, whose tremulous reliance on a few patented drugs Hamilton observes with a speechless sneer. But he wants to do something to the camp. He wants to doctor it.
Mind and body are preparing for war. The body, during the waking hours, with its regimes, its saturnalias of self. The mind at night. Something is savaging his sleep. Surprised into consciousness, alone in the black hemisphere, he cries until he laughs; then he uses the chamber pot that Rosa readied, and goes back to sleep quickly, despite the pain. Somewhere in the severe dance of this roiling sleep I can sense the beginnings of a profound rearrangement, as if everything bad might soon be good, as if everything wrong might soon be right. Admittedly this new recurring dream of his, in bald summary, doesn’t sound particularly encouraging, but I think it’s ambivalent and could go either way. He dreams he is shitting human bones.… Now and then, when the night sky is starless, I look up and form the hilarious suspicion that the world will soon start making sense.
One hot afternoon I came down from my bedroom, after a brief but taxing siesta, to see the Agent pull up in his outlandish Packard. Over a cognac he gloomily informs us of the Japanese surrender. Lourdes and Ana, I notice, have tears in their eyes and keep crossing themselves. The Agent tells me apologetically about the superstitious fears of these simple people. The end of the world. A bomba atómica … I was astonished. So! They did it. They had to go ahead and do it. Just when world abolition looked like a certainty. They couldn’t resist: limited nuclear war.… Rather rudely, perhaps, Hamilton decided to take Bustos for a romp and leave them all to it. On our return the Agent had gone and the women were calm, unlike Bustos, that foolish puppy, who spins at my feet and fixes me with his heartbroken eyes.
There is a growing coldness in the household. Emotion is retreating from it. This is how things should be. Rosa, who still works for us, has safely escaped into childhood. The gaze that Hamilton turns toward her no longer moves softly across her face, her pink rags. This is fit. We will now be able to take our leave of Rosa with a quick nod, a little inclination from the vertical. I won’t even miss Bustos, which the Agent dragged off months ago.
War wasn’t going to come to us. War wasn’t going to roll through our village. We were going to be inserted into it—with what they call surgical precision. With slow care.
One was not sorry to bid farewell to Portugal and its rhythm of misery and fiesta, the docks, the Agent’s clueless stare. And one did what one could with the conditions on the sordid steamer. Actually Hamilton himself, so smart and handsome when he travels, soon looked as grimy and fatalistic as everybody else. There were about twenty passengers (this was no passenger ship) and we slept in the mess, on benches and deck chairs, much resented by the crew, each of us with his possessions, or his secret, crushed like a lover in his arms and whispered to in all the languages of Europe.… The other language, stoppered in Hamilton’s throat: it is climbing to the surface. It twitches inside him.… Of course, we converse with no man: just sighs and nods and frowns, speech-waivers. They play cards all day. They are low persons, flotsam. What does the war want of them? They look fully disgraced. We have our gold, stored in a second belt beneath our shirt, and tugging heavily on our nethers.
I had always thought of Italy as my spiritual home. Hence the initial disappointment of Salerno. We stayed in a cheap boardinghouse from which the landlord saw fit to evict us for all the hours of daylight; strolling abroad, we devoted our time to churchgoing and to incoherent altercations with the Italian police. Hamilton, it turns out, despite his observances of the Wellport era, has no great liking for churches. He sits in the first pew he comes to and leers at the door every twenty seconds with the frowsiest of sighs. Once he approached the altar and extinguished a candle on the chest there, and pocketed a few imperceptible coins. A single glance at the crucified Christ, the worshiped corpse: a figure bent like a branch whose shape has changed in the stretching agony of fire. Above our head, an unregarded observatory of light. Then out again to the open air and the waiting carbinieri and the dumb show of pappaciere and papieri.
A vaudevillian menace charged our journey to Rome, the locomotive black and chimerical, and the Stazione Termini like an anti-cathedral with its soot-stained glass and vaultlike coldness and smell of earth’s crust or hell’s rafters. Boldly we made our way through the incredible promiscuity of the streets: men with shoes made out of silver-birch bark, women wearing sacks and carpets, children in their dusty birthday suits. Their faces: they look like people on their way into hospital, as if life is worryingly but fascinatingly strange. Such unanimity of stun and daze. It’s okay, I want to tell them. We’re all going to make it. None will vanish. Many will appear. A cordial welcome—and a light lunch—awaited us at the monastery (Franciscan) on the Via Sicilia. After that we were off out again. Where to? Where else. The Vatican.
We become quite a regular there, as a matter of fact, nine consecutive mornings, including two Sundays, past the battlements, through gardens, then down the long loot-crammed passages, with glass cases full of baubles and beauties, and oblongs of oils and tapestries and embroidered maps reeling past our sight—to the waiting room. Actually Father Duryea, our contact, our man, always saw us right away; but that didn’t stop Hamilton from hanging around for hours afterward, in the waiting room. Tense, silent, on the chair by the table with its flower bowl and its dish of cracked apples. Father Duryea was an Irishman. His rampant facial heat had set up its headquarters in his nose; from there, stray tendrils of blood seemed to leak into his remorseful gray eyes. His mouth, too, was a scene of pain. His poor mouth. Hamilton greeted him with emotional thanks and immediately surrendered our papers: our little Nansen passport, our Portuguese visa, even the ticket coupon with which we had been issued at the harbor of Salerno. Father Duryea appeared to be hopeful and indulgent. But these things take time. Time in the waiting room, staring at the wounded apples and their open flesh.
Time in the monastery on the Via Sicilia—where Hamilton seems to have taken his own vow of silence. The food I fill the plate with there reflects the character of the institution: it is simple, but perfectly sustaining. We have our own little cell. The monastery is full of wayfarers like me, ghosts with half a name (I feel I’m between names at the moment). The Vatican is full of supplicants like me, calling, “Father. Father.” Europe, probably, is full of people like me, adjusting our stance for the lurch into war. So I am lonely, but not alone, like everybody else. Shame heats our cell, and push-ups, and prayers. Yes, prayers. His prayers are like the noise you make to drown out an insupportable thought. I might be impressed and affected by this sudden talent for suffering, if it weren’t for its monoto
ny: fear, just fear, fear only. Why? We’re all going to make it. Yet with hands clasped he whimpers and gibbers with such desperate ardor for his own preservation, on his knees. To show good faith, or to show something, he even tried a thing with … you know: the chair, the belt suspended from the rafter. It didn’t work, needless to say. As I took the trouble to explain earlier, you can’t do that. You can’t do that, not once you’re here.
Yesterday we found a photograph, under the bushes behind the willow trees. In small scraps—we pieced it together. The face of a young woman: dark, downy, pleasant, direct. Not especially forgiving. I fear that’s our wife.
How heavy it is to sit there in the waiting room, on the chair, by the table, with one’s penitent perfecto, watching the cankered apples heal.
“We help those that need,” said Father Duryea, on our final visit, “not those that deserve.”
“You do what you do best,” said Hamilton, “not what’s best to do.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“I can’t explain what I did. I can’t ask you to help me.”
“Ah now.”
“I’m nothing. I’m dead. I’m just … I’m not even …”
Father Duryea sat up. And so did I. In a deep and distant voice Hamilton went on, “I lost my idea of the gentleness of human flesh.”
“Explain,” said Father Duryea.
“We lost our feeling about the human body. Children even. Tiny babies.”
So. Sense. Here it comes. It’s all coming out. It’s been in here too long and now it’s all coming out. The corridors and theaters, the Peter Pan Ward, the desk-top terminations, the eyes of the unlistened-to: that world of pain with darkness at the bottom of it.
Father Duryea’s face contracted around the scorched core of his nose. And he said, “I understand.”
“You know where I was. In a situation like that certain acts suggested themselves.”
“I understand, my son.”
“The situation was mad and impossible.”
“There is no need to say.”
Hamilton moistened his cheeks with his sleeve and sniffed richly. “There were things …”
“Speak.”
“I still want to heal, Father. Perhaps, that way, by doing good …”
“Hell?”
“I’ve been to hell.”
“Of course. Of course.”
“I have sinned, Father.”
“You seem troubled, my child.”
At this point Hamilton handed over our various laissez-passer, and Father Duryea presented him with his new documents. Before doing so, Father Duryea stared at them for many arduous minutes. Stared at them with his bleeding eyes. Our parting was marked by the usual formalities, the usual compliments paid to my unimprovable English.
Hamilton and I spent our last night in Rome at a very respectable hotel on the Via Garibaldi, near the high walls of the prison. So high were these prison walls, indeed, that they left you wondering at the build of the common Italian criminal. I pictured a menagerie of depraved and black-toothed giraffes, each with his slashback and switchblade.… We even had our own bathroom, in whose tub we wallowed for well over an hour. Clean breast. Clean hands.
Our name has changed once more. I don’t think it will ever change again. Rather alarmingly at first, it has to be said, we are now called Odilo Unverdorben.
And clean heels. Our journey north was charmed. We were the baton in a relay race to war.
By train to Bologna (where I bought my hiking boots), by truck to Rovereto; thenceforward we moved in daily spurts of twenty or twenty-five miles, always accompanied or monitored, from village to village, farm to farm, on foot, by cart, in preposterous automobiles. And the land shown me by my guides, my deliverers, how painterly it was, the buildings of earthen crockery, the stone variegated like pork brawn in the mild breath of dusk. How thickly grassed and trimly forested: here, and now, the earth has good hair, thick and trim, and a good scalp beneath, not like there, not like before, all patched and pocked. The land is innocent. It never did anything.
March and February we spent on the Brenner, where we lodged at three different farmsteads. While hardly ideal, our living arrangements were suitably ascetic, and conducive to inner preparation. Personally I longed for human society and for exercise (a good long tramp, for example), but no doubt Odilo had his reasons. Had his reasons for those weeks spent in hayloft and cowshed under a mound of blankets with nothing to do but pray and shiver. We heard the distinct whispers of dawn and dusk, and the dogs barking, but no further rumor of war. It was snowing on the day we resumed our northward journey. Snowing patiently, for there was much of it on the ground, many snowflakes to be restored like white souls to the heavens. By jeep and truck we moved swiftly up through the towns and cities of middle Europe. Much of it was junk and trash, awaiting collection by war. Buildings were black, awaiting the color of fire. People were smudged, trampled, awaiting the hooves and treads of armies. Europe churned in the night like the seas of human forms round the stoves of station waiting rooms. Everywhere I went, their expressions charged with power and delight, men gave me gold.
I knew all this gold was sacred and indispensable to our mission. Accordingly, at the final staging post, the final farm, within view of the River Vistula, where we lived well and warmly, and there were the heads of children to pat and tousle, and the striped mattress before the fire—we buried our gold. Swearing most eloquently and solemnly, we buried the pouched filings under a compost heap behind the barn. Of course, the act was merely symbolic: the gold’s temporary return to the earth. Because we dug it up again five days later, after the compost heap had gone. When he swears, Odilo invokes human ordure, from which, as we now know, all human good eventually emanates.
How many times have I asked myself: when is the world going to start making sense? Yet the answer is out there. It is rushing toward me over the uneven ground.
5
Here there is no why
The world is going to start making sense …
… Now.
I, Odilo Unverdorben, arrived in Auschwitz Central somewhat precipitately and by motorbike, with a wide twirl or frill of slush and mud, shortly after the Bolsheviks had entrained their ignoble withdrawal. Now. Was there a secret passenger on the backseat of the bike, or in some imaginary sidecar? No. I was one. I was also in full uniform. Beyond the southern boundary of the Lager, in a roofless barn, I had slipped out of our coarse traveling clothes and emotionally donned the black boots, the white coat, the fleece-lined jacket, the peaked cap, the pistol. The motorbike I found earlier, wedged into a ditch. Oh how I soared out of there, with what vaulting eagerness, what daring.… Now I straddled this heavy machine and revved with jerked gauntlet. Auschwitz lay around me, miles and miles of it, like a somersaulted Vatican. Human life was all ripped and torn. But I was one now, fused for a preternatural purpose.
Your shoulder blades still jolted to the artillery of the Russians as they scurried eastward. What had they done here? Done something as an animal does: just finds it’s gone ahead and done it. I reacted on impulse. To tell the truth, I was in less than perfect control of myself. I started shouting (they sounded like shouts of pain and rage). And at whom? At these coat hangers and violin bows, at these aitches and queries and crawling double-U’s, ranked like tabloid expletives? I marched; I marched, shouting, over the bridge and across all the railway tracks and into the birch wood—into the place I would come to know as Birkenau. After a short and furious rest in the potato store I entered the women’s hospital, inflexibly determined on an inspection. It was not appropriate. I see that now (it was a swoon of where-to-begin?). My arrival only deepened the stupefaction of the few orderlies, never mind the patients, sprawled two or three to a straw sack and still well short of the size of a woman. And rats as big as cats! I was astonished by the power with which my German crashed out of me, as if in millennial anger at having been silenced for so long. In the washroom another deracinating spectacle: mar
ks and pfennigs—good tender—stuck to the wall with human ordure. A mistake: a mistake. What is the meaning of this? Ordure, ordure everywhere. Even on my return through the ward, past ulcer and edema, past sleepwalker and sleeptalker, I could feel the hungry suck of it on the soles of my black boots. Outside: everywhere. This stuff, this human stuff, at normal times (and in civilized locales) tastefully confined to the tubes and runnels, subterranean, unseen—this stuff had burst its banks, surging outward and upward onto the floor, the walls, the very ceiling of life. Naturally, I didn’t immediately see the logic and justice of it. I didn’t immediately see this: that now human shit is out in the open, we’ll get a chance to find out what this stuff can really do.
That first morning I was served a rudimentary breakfast in the Officers’ Home. I felt quite calm, though I could neither eat nor drink. With my ham and my cheese, which were not of my making, they brought me iced seltzer. There was only one other officer present. I was keen to exercise my German, but we didn’t speak. He held his coffee cup as a woman does, with both palms curled around it, for the warmth; and you could hear the china tapping its morse against his teeth. On several occasions he stood up with some serenity and went to the bathroom, and dived back in again gracelessly scrabbling at his belt. This, I soon saw, was a kind of acclimatization. For the first few weeks I was seldom off the toilet bowl myself.
My utterly silent cubicle has a shallow orange bath mat on the floor beside the bed. To welcome the faint dampness of my German feet, as I turn in. To welcome the faint dampness of my German feet, as I rise.
