Amis, Martin - Time's Arrow (v1.0)

by Time's Arrow(Lit)

  We cry at both ends of life, while the doctor watches. It was I, Odilo Unverdorben, who personally removed the pellets of Zyklon B and entrusted them to the pharmacist in his white coat. Next, the facade of the Sprinkleroom, the function of whose spouts and nozzles (and numbered seats and wardrobe tickets, and signs in six or seven languages) was merely to reassure and not, alas, to cleanse; and the garden path beyond.

  Clothes, spectacles, hair, spinal braces, and so on—these came later. Entirely intelligibly, though, to prevent needless suffering, the dental work was usually completed while the patients were not yet alive. The Kapos would go at it, crudely but effectively, with knives or chisels or any tool that came to hand. Most of the gold we used, of course, came direct from the Reichsbank. But every German present, even the humblest, gave willingly of his own store—I more than any other officer save "Uncle Pepi" himself. I knew my gold had a sacred efficacy. All those years I amassed it, and polished it with my mind: for the Jews' teeth. The bulk of the clothes were contributed by the Reich Youth Leadership. Hair for the Jews came courtesy of Filzfabrik A.G. of Roth, near Nuremberg. Freight cars full of it. Freight car after freight car.

  At this point, notwithstanding, I should like to log one of several possible caveats or reservations. In the Sprinkleroom the patients eventually get dressed in the clothes provided, which, though seldom very clean, are at least always pertinently cut. Here, the guards have a habit of touching the women. Sometimes—certainly—to bestow a jewel, a ring, a small valuable. But at other times quite gratuitously. Oh, I think they mean well enough. It is done in the irrepressible German manner: coltishly, and with lit face. And they only do it to the angry ones. And it definitely has the effect of calming them down. One touch, there, a d

  they go all numb and blocked, like the others. (Who wail sometimes. Who stare at us with incredulous scorn. But I understand their condition. I'm sympathetic; I accept all that.) It may be symbolic, this touching of the women. Life and love must go on. Life and love must emphatically and resonantly go on: here, that's what we're all about. Yet there is a patina of cruelty, intense cruelty, almost as if creation corrupts. ... I don't want to touch the girls' bodies. As is well known, I frown on such harassment. I don't even want to look at them. The bald girls with their enormous eyes. Just made, and all raw from their genesis. I'm a little worried by it: I mean, this fastidiousness is so out of character. The delicacy of the situation, with their parents and often their grandparents there and everything (as in a thwarted erotic dream), would hardly explain the lack of visual stimulation; and I get on like a house on fire with the girls in the officers' bordello. No. I think it must have something to do with my wife.

  The overwhelming majority of the women, the children, and the elderly we process with gas and fire. The men, of course, as is right, walk a different path to recovery. Arbeit Macht Frei says the sign on the gate, with typically gruff and unde-signing eloquence. The men work for their freedom. There they go now, in the autumn dusk, the male patients in their light pajamas, while the band plays. They march in ranks of five, in their wooden clogs. Look. There's a thing they do, with their heads. They bend their heads right back until their faces are entirely open to the sky. I've tried it. I try to do it, and I can't. There's this fist of flesh at the base of my neck, which the men don't yet have. The men come here awful thin. You can't get a stethoscope to them. The bell bridges on their ribs. Their hearts sound far away.

  There they go, to the day's work, with their heads bent back. I was puzzled at first but now I know why they do it, why they stretch their throats like that. They are looking for the souls of their mothers and their fathers, their women and their children, gathering in the heavens—awaiting human form, and union. . . . The sky above the Vistula is full of stars. I can see them now. They no longer hurt my eyes.

  These familial unions and arranged marriages, known as selections on the ramp, were the regular high points of the KZ routine. It is a commonplace to say that the triumph of Auschwitz was essentially organizational: we found the sacred fire that hides in the human heart—and built an autobahn that went there. But how to explain the divine synchronies of the ramp? At the very moment that the weak and young and old were brought from the Sprinkleroom to the railway station, as good as new, so their menfolk completed the appointed term of labor service and ventured forth to claim them, on the ramp, a trifle disheveled to be sure, but strong and sleek from their regime of hard work and strict diet. As matchmakers, we didn't know the meaning of the word failure; on the ramp, stunning successes were as cheap as spit. When the families coalesced, how their hands and eyes would plead for one another, under our indulgent gaze. We toasted them far into the night. One guard, his knees bent and swaying, played an accordion. Actually we all drank like fiends. The stag party on the ramp, and the Kapos, like the groom's best friends, shoving the man into the waiting cart—freshly sprayed with trash and shit—for the journey home.

  The Auschwitz universe, it has to be allowed, was fiercely coprocentric. It was made of shit. In the early months I still had my natural aversion to overcome, before I understood the fundamental strangeness of the process of fruition.

  Enlightenment was urged on me the day I saw the old Jew float to the surface of the deep latrine, how he splashed and struggled into life, and was hoisted out by the jubilant guards, his clothes cleansed by the mire. Then they put his beard back on. I also found it salutary to watch the Scheissekommando about its work. This team had the job of replenishing the ditches from the soil wagon, not with buckets or anything like that but with flat wooden spades. In fact a great many of the camp's labor programs were quite clearly unproductive. They weren't destructive either. Fill that hole. Dig it up again. Shift that. Then shift it back. Therapy was the order of the day. . . . The Scheissekommando was made up of our most cultured patients: academics, rabbis, writers, philosophers. As they worked, they sang arias, and whistled scraps of symphonies, and recited poetry, and talked of Heine, and Schiller, and Goethe ... In the officers' club, when we are drinking (which we nearly always are), and where shit is constantly mentioned and invoked, we sometimes refer to Auschwitz as Anus Mundi. And I can think of no finer tribute than that.

  There are other revealing examples of camp argot. The main Ovenroom is called Heavenblock, its main approach road Heavenstreet. Chamber and Sprinkleroom are known, most mordantly, as the central hospital. Sommerfrische is our name for a tour of duty here, in any season: "summer air," suggesting a perennial vacation from an inadequate reality. When we mean never we say tomorrow morning—it's like the Spanish saying mañana. The slenderest patients, those whose faces are nothing more than a triangle of bone around the eyes, they're Muselmänner: not, as I first thought, as an ironical glance at musclemen. No. The angularity of hip and shoulder suggests Muslims—Muslims at prayer. Of course, they're not Muslims. They're Jews. Well, we converted them! Wh n

  will it happen, the conversion of the Jews? Tomorrow morning. The rumor and gossip, which often tend to overexcite the male patients, we leniently designate as latrine talk.

  Hier ist kein warum. . . . Disappointingly, my German fails to improve. I speak it, and appear to understand it, and give and take orders in it, but on some level it just isn't sinking in. My German is no more advanced than my Portuguese. I think it took a lot out of me learning colloquial English. That was my shot. It's a funny language, German. For one thing, everybody shouts it. All those very long words: the literalism, the tinkertoy accumulation. It sounds pushy, beginning every sentence with a verb like that. And take the first person singular: ich. "Ich." Not a masterpiece of reassurance, is it? I sounds nobly erect. Je has a certain strength and intimacy. Eo's okay. Yo I can really relate to. Yo! But ich? It's like the sound a child makes when it confronts its own . . . Perhaps that's part of the point. No doubt all will come clear as soon as my German gets better. When will that be? I know. Tomorrow morning!

  In the officers' bordello, which is situated, appropriately, at the far corn
er of the Experimental Block (its windows permanently shuttered or boarded), I have changed the amatory habits of a lifetime. Much of the old thoroughness has gone. Much of the attention to detail that was wont to mark my dealings with the gentler sex. It may be an awareness of my married status (of which my colleagues often jokingly remind me), or a way of squaring all my activities with the ethos of the KZ, or a simple boredom with the female face, but now my thrusts of love—so sudden, so hurried, so helpless, so hopeless—are exclusively directed at the source of universal sustenance and fruition. The bald whores give us no money. We ask no questions. Because here there is no why.

  Another Kat-Zet usage, widely current, used in many forms: it sounds like smistig, but it would appear to be a conflation of two German substantives, Schmutzstück and Scbmuckstück, "garbage" and "jewel." Ironically, again, smistig means "come to an end," "concluded," "finished."

  I have started corresponding with my wife, whose name is Herta. Herta's letters come, not from the fire (das Feuer), but from the trash (der Plunder). And they are in German. My letters to Herta are brought to me by the valet. I laboriously erase them, here, at night, in the silent room. I am left with nice sheets of white paper. But what for? My letters are in German too, though they contain gobbets of English that are playfully pedagogic in tone. I think it makes sense that Herta and I should get to know each other in this way. We're pen pals.

  It seems that my wife has already conceived her doubts about the work we are doing here. Obviously the misunderstanding will have to be cleared up. There is also the matter of the baby (das Baby). "My darling, my one, my all, there will be other babies," I write, somewhat confusingly. "There will be lots of little babies." I don't much like the sound of this. Is the baby—is das Baby the bomb baby? The baby that has such power over its parents? I don't think so. Our baby (which has a name: Eva) exerts colossal power as a subject. But not the physical power that the bomb baby exerted, over its parents and over everybody else in the black room: some thirty souls.

  The photograph of her I found in Rome, in the gardens of the monastery—I take it out and look at it. At night my eyes are full of tears. By day I throw myself into my work. I wonder if there will be any end to the sacrifices I am being asked to make.

  —————

  "Uncle Pepi" was everywhere. This being the thing that was most often said about him. For instance, "It's as if he's everywhere," or "The man seems to be everywhere," or, more simply, " 'Uncle Pepi' is everywhere." Omnipresence was only one of several attributes that tipped him over into the realm of the superhuman. He was also fantastically clean, for Auschwitz; when he was present, and he was present everywhere, I could sense the various cuts and nicks on my queasy jawline, my short but disobedient hair, the unhappy hang of my uniform, my lusterless black boots. His face was feline in shape, wide at the temples, and his blink was as slow as any cat's. On the ramp he cut a frankly glamorous figure, where he moved like a series of elegant decisions. You felt that he was only playing the part of a human being. Self-isolated as he was, "Uncle Pepi" nonetheless displayed the best kind of condescension, and was in fact unusually collegial—not so much with youngsters like myself, of course, but with more senior medical figures, like Thilo and Wirths. I was moreover privileged—and on something like a regular basis—to assist "Uncle Pepi" in Room 1 on Block 20 and later in Block 10 itself.

  I recognized Room 1 from my dreams. The pink rubber apron on its hook, the instrument bowls and thermoses, the bloody cotton, the half-pint hypodermic with its foot-long needle. This is the room, I had thought, where something mortal would be miserably decided. But dreams are playful, and love to tease and poke fun at the truth. . . . Already showing signs of life, patients were brought in one by one from the pile next door and wedged onto the chair in Room 1, which looked like what it was, a laboratory in the Hygienic Institute, a world of bubbles and bottles. With the syringe there were two ways to go, intravenous and cardia ,

  "Uncle Pepi" tending to champion the latter as more efficient and humane. We did both. Cardiac: the patient blindfolded with a towel, his right hand placed in the mouth to stifle his own whimpers, the needle eased into the dramatic furrow of the fifth rib space. Intravenous: the patient with his forearm on the support table, the rubber tourniquet, the visible vein, the needle, the judicious dab of alcohol. "Uncle Pepi" was then sometimes obliged to bring them to their senses with a few slaps about the face. The corpses were pink and blue-bruised. Death was pink but yellowish, and contained in a glass cylinder labeled Phenol. A day of that and you stroll out in your white coat and black boots, with the familiar headache and the plangent perfecto and the breakfast tannic gathering in your throat, and the eastward sky looked like phenol.

  He led. We followed. Phenol work became absolutely routine. All of us did it the whole time. It wasn't until later that I saw what "Uncle Pepi" was capable of, in Block 10.

  My wife Herta paid her first visit to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944, which was perhaps unfortunate: we were then doing the Hungarian Jews, and at an incredible rate, something like ten thousand a day. Unfortunate, because I was on ramp duty practically every night, finding the work somewhat impersonal too, the selections now being made by loudspeaker (such was the weight of traffic), and having little to do but stand there drinking and shouting with my colleagues—thus denying Herta the kind of undivided attention that every young wife craves. . . . Wait. Let me go at this another way.

  Everything was ready for her. Thoughtful as ever, Dr. Wirths had made available the annex of his own living quarters— a delightful apartment (with its own kitchen and bathroom) beyond whose patterned lace curtains stood a high whi e

  fence. Beyond that, unseen, the benign cacophony of the Kat-Zet . . . Dr. Wirths has his wife and three children with him, at present. I hoped that Herta would spend some of her time playing with the little Wirthses. Though that might touch on a sensitive subject. ... I was sitting on the sofa, quietly crying; I think I was wishing that Auschwitz looked better than it did, just now, with its windless heat and plagues of flies homing in on the marshes. As I heard the staff car approach I wandered out into the pale brown of the front garden. What did I expect? The familiar awkwardness, I suppose. Reproaches, accusations, sadness—perhaps even feeble blows from feeble fists. All to be at least partly resolved, that first night, in the act of love. Or certainly the second. That's how these things usually begin. What I didn't expect was a statement of truth. The truth was the last thing I was ready for. I should have known. The world, after all, here in Auschwitz, has a new habit. It makes sense.

  The driver looked on sentimentally as she alighted from the car and made her way down the path. Then she turned to confront me. She looked nothing like her photograph. The girl in the photograph, whose face was clear.

  "You are a stranger to me," she said. Fremder: stranger.

  "Please," I said. "Please. My darling." Bitte. Liebling.

  "I don't know you," she said. Ich kenne dich nicht.

  Herta kept her head down as I helped her off with her coat. And something enveloped me, something that was all ready for my measurements, like a suit or a uniform, over and above what I wore, and lined with grief.

  Her shyness proved impregnable. We lunched quietly, indeed wordlessly, on the fluidal sausages. Herta was all thumbs with the heavy cutlery and the Swedish glassware. When the servants left, she went and sat on the sofa a d

  stared at the attractive rug. I joined her. She proved immune to my light-headed but rather leaden gallantries, the words so hard to shift around. Actually I felt far from well myself. And worse and worse as the morning wore on. And then entirely terrible, after a convulsive visit to the small but resonant bathroom, whose greasy air was full of racing currents, fire-tinged. I betook myself to bed in some exasperation, and without really bothering to get undressed. When I awoke around four A.M., still in my boots, she was lying beside me, entombed in her woolen nightgown, and fiercely whispering, Nein. Nie. Nie. Never. Never. No amount o
f caresses or endearments (or good-hearted raillery) seemed likely to soften her. I got out of bed—gah!—and then picked myself up off the floor. Herta was now fast asleep. I remember thinking how white and cold and still her face looked, without the breeze of thought or sentience, as I stumbled off to the tumult of the ramp.

  Ours was a human enterprise, but the animal kingdom played its part in the new order of being. Cartfuls of corpses were shoved from the burial pits by mules and oxen, and stupidly, with no animal comment. Cows did not look up from their grazing, their indifference seeming to say, This is all right. This need not be remarked, as if it wasn't unusual to conjure a multitude from the sky above the river. We kept rabbits, too, in much the same way as we dealt with the people, improvisationally and with desperate brilliance. Men gave up the very linings of their greatcoats to provide the little creatures with fur. And then of course there were the dogs, boxers, their crushed faces, their squat coats bearing the ubiquitous sign of the twisted cross, in honor of the Jews they healed with their teeth and with the snort and quiver of their jaws.

  In the clubroom I am told (I think I've got this right): Jews come from monkeys (from Menschenafferì), as do Slavs and so on. Germans, on the other hand, have been preserved in ice from the beginning of time in the lost continent of Atlantis. This is good to know. A meteorology division in the Ahnenerbe has been looking into it. Officially these scientists are working on long-range weather predictions; in fact, though, they are seeking to prove the cosmic-ice theory once and for all.