It sounds familiar. Atlantis . . . twins and dwarves. The Ahnenerbe is a department of the Schutzstaffel. Schutzstaffel: Defense Force. Ahnenerbe: Ancestral Heritage. It is from the Ahnenerbe that "Uncle Pepi" is sent his skulls and bones.
I am, of course, no stranger to feminine wiles. But I was disappointed, I was very disappointed, when the second night with Herta went no better than the first. Went no different, in fact. Will nothing "melt the ice"—the cosmic ice of marriage? The idea of a gradual familiarization was not without its initial appeal. But surely, I thought, on the third and final night, which we were to have all to ourselves . . .
Herta's nightdress is childish. It is patterned with genies and sprites. I begged of them, these sprites and genies. Deliriously, all night, in bed, I begged—oh, the bedbug of nightbeg . . . There were periods, earlier on, when I was calmer and we could talk a little. She spoke tearfully of das Baby; and the baby does sound fairly disastrous. I also got the distinct impression that Herta disapproves of the work I am doing here. In her incensed whisper she called me names I didn't understand. They made her face ugly, even in the dark. Why can't I answer?
The next day she was gone and the next night I w s
back on the ramp. Playing Cupid. I still don't know what my wife looks like. She never met my eye. No. I never met hers. Things will improve. She will come around, in time. Has someone been telling her what I did to the bald whores?
Out on the ramp beneath the lights and the arrows of rain and the madhouse tannoy squawking links and rechts: fathers, mothers, children, the old, scattered like leaves in the wind. Die . . . die Auseinandergeschrieben. And I had a thought that made my whole body thrill with shame. Because the trains are endless and infernal, and because the wind feels like the wind of death, and because life is life (and love is love) but no one said it was easy.
I thought: It's all right for some.
With the war going so well now, and with the perceptible decline in the workload after the feats of '44, and with the general burgeoning of confidence and well-being, why, your camp doctor is agreeably surprised to find time and leisure to pursue his hobbies. The troglodytic Soviets have been driven back into their frozen potholes: the camp doctor steadies his monocle and reaches for his mustiest textbook. Or his binoculars and shooting stick. Whatever. Depending on natural bent. Winter was cold but autumn is come—the stubble fields, and so on. The simpering Vistula. Never before have I seen lice by the bushel. Some of the patients look as though they have been showered with poppy seeds. Good morning to you, Scheissminister! In one of her baffling letters Herta goes so far as to question the legality of the work we are doing here. Well. Let me see ... I suppose you could say that there are one or two "gray areas." Block 11, the Black Wall, the measures of the Political Unit: these excite lively controversy. And there's certainly no end of a palaver when a patient "takes matters into his own hands,"
with the electrified fence, for example. We all hate that . . . I am famed for my quiet dedication. The other doctors disappear for weeks on end; but in the summer air of the Kat-Zet I have no need of Sommerfrische. I do love the feel of the sun on my face, it's true. "Uncle Pepi" has surpassed himself with his new laboratory: the marble table, the nickel taps, the bloodstained porcelain sinks. Provincial: that's the word for Herta. You know, of course, that she doesn't shave her legs? It's true. About the armpits one can eternally argue, but the legs—surely!—the legs ... In this new lab of his he can knock together a human being out of the unlikeliest odds and ends. On his desk he had a box full of eyes. It was not uncommon to see him slipping out of his darkroom carrying a head partly wrapped in old newspaper: evidently, we now rule Rome. The next thing you knew, there'd be, oh, I don't know, a fifteen-year-old Pole sliding off the table and rubbing his eyes and sauntering back to work, accompanied by an orderly and his understanding smile. We measure twins together, "Uncle Pepi" and I, for hours and hours: measure measure measure. Even the most skeletal patients thrust their chests out for medical inspection in the last block on the right: a scant fifteen minutes earlier they were flat on the floor of the Inhalationsraume. It would be criminal—it would be criminal to neglect the opportunity that Auschwitz affords for the furtherance ... I see him at the wheel of his Mercedes-Benz, on the day the gypsy camp was established, personally ferrying the children from "the central hospital." The gypsy camp, its rosy pinks, its dirty prettiness. " 'Uncle Pepi'!" " 'Uncle Pepi'!" the children cried. When was that? When did we do the gypsy camp? Before the Czech family camp? Yes. Oh, long ago. Herta came again. Her second visit could not be accounted a complete success, though we were much more intimate than before, and wept a l t
together about the baby. As to the so-called "experimental" operations of "Uncle Pepi": he had a success rate that approached—and quite possibly attained—100 percent. A shockingly inflamed eyeball at once rectified by a single injection. Innumerable ovaries and testes seamlessly grafted into place. Women went out of that lab looking twenty years younger. We can make another baby, Herta and I. If I wept copiously both before and after, she let me do it, or try it, but I am impotent and don't even go to the whores anymore. I have no power. I am completely helpless. The sweet smell here, the sweet smell, and the dazzled Jews. "Uncle Pepi" never left any scars. You know, it isn't all sweetness and light here, not by any manner of means. Some of the patients were doctors. And it wasn't long before they were up to their old tricks. I am prominent in the campaign against this filth. The baby will be here soon and I feel very concerned. "Uncle Pepi" is right: I do need a holiday. But my visit to Berlin for the funeral turns out be mercifully brief: I only remember the drizzling parquetry of the streets, the shop-lights like the valves of an old radio, the drenched churchyard, the skin and weight problems of the young cleric, Herta's parents, Herta's hideous face. There is a war on, I keep telling everyone. We are in the front line. What are we fighting? Phenol? On my return from Berlin to the light and space of the KZ, what should await me but a telegram. The baby is very weak, and the doctors have done all they can. The casket was about fifteen by twenty inches. I am fighting the phenol war, and thanklessly. No one shows me any gratitude. I seem to have developed a respiratory difficulty— stress asthma, perhaps—particularly when I am shouting. I have to shout. The pits are bursting. In the Sprinkleroom, when the guards touch the young girls, and I repeatedly register my objections, the men mime the playing of violins.
They think, because I am now a husband and father, that I have become pious and mawkish. I long to see my little Eva, of course; the present situation, however, is counterindicative. I have stopped going to the bordello but at least I now know why I went: for the gratitude. Those patient-doctors are getting quite out of hand. For some reason they are especially zealous in their interference with the children: how repulsive and wanton this is, when you consider that the children, after all, won't be around for very long. I am not "in it" for the gratitude. No. I am "in it"—if you want a why—because I love the human body and all living things. It isn't just phenol we're fighting, not anymore. In that sense the war front has widened. It is a war on death that now comes in many forms. As well as phenol we are obliged to extract prussic acid and sodium evipan. Time is running out. We have lost two Sprinklerooms. There is a tickling in the heart when completion is so near and there are souls still stacked like desperate airplanes circling above an airport. Some exceptions should be duly noted: an old man hugging and kissing my black boots; a child clinging to me after I held her down for "Uncle Pepi." But not once did I receive what might be described as sober and reasoned thanks. Oh, I'm not complaining. But it would have been nice. "Uncle Pepi," who used to thank me, disappeared months ago, leaving me to my own devices. I loved the man. As well as prussic acid and sodium evipan I now extract benzene, gasoline, kerosene, and air. Yes, air! Human beings want to be alive. They are dying to be alive. Twenty cubic centimeters of air—twenty cubic centimeters of nothing—is all you need to make the difference. So nobody thanks me as, wit
h a hypodermic almost the size of a trombone and my right foot firmly stamped on the patient's chest, I continue to prosecute the war against nothing and air.
6
Multiply zero by zero and you still get zero
Well, how do you follow that? The
answer is: you can't. Of course
you can't.
And there comes a point where you have to call an end or at least announce a limit to sacrifice. Ah, I'm no saint, God knows. I wasn't put here just to live for others. And while I continued to make my contribution, I really did feel it was high time I started looking out for number one.
I followed the Kat-Zet with robust activity, with the wry observances of married life, and with emotion. This new thing in my life called emotion. My departure from Auschwitz I think of as the wrench. It never crossed my mind that I would ever recover from the suffering I underwent during my last days there, and especially my last hours. But it passed, quicker than any marsh fever, as I set out on my journey to Berlin—and was replaced by emotion, by the accession of innumerable sensitivities, not without their pivotal elements of pain. It was the pain, perhaps, of being young. It was 1942. I was twenty-five. . . . The train to Berlin, by the way, was prompt and expeditious. Auschwitz Central was no mere spur or siding. It was the biggest station I have ever seen, and served all Europe, direct. One of our last shipments went straight to Paris: Special Train 767, to Bourget-Drancy. Auschwitz was a secret. It covered fourteen thousand acres, and it was invisible. It was there, and it wasn't there. It was outside. So how can you follow it?
Herta is utterly transformed. Yes, my wife is more or less unrecognizable in every way. She is pregnant, after all— prodigious, luminous; and she pampers me outrageously. I don't quite know what I did to deserve this radical revision in status. Our German baby is of startling dimensions: bigger, if anything, than the woman herself. Herta is no more than the string on the parcel in which the baby sleeps. For the time being we reside with her parents in their small but practical house in the southern suburbs of Berlin. Much of our time is spent in morbid speculation about the b by's
name. We favored Eva or Dieter at first; but now we seem to have settled on Birgitta or Eduard. Sensibly, if laboriously, Herta is dismantling the baby's clothes. I myself spend an hour or two a day in the garden hut with my father-in-law, dismantling the baby's cot and high chair. Our room, Herta's room, seems to be analogously prepared for her own eventual childhood. The fairies of the wallpaper smile down on the conjugal bed, which is a single, as slim as a bunk. Its dairy aroma encloses Herta, her shocking new breasts, her ovoid belly. The baby comes between us. It's more comfortable if Herta lies on her side and I take up position behind her. Annoyingly, however, I am still impotent. Nervous exhaustion, no doubt; perhaps, too, a guilty reminder (in the way our bodies are juxtaposed) of the gratitude I sampled in the camp. Though Herta has hair: lots of hair. Anyway, she talked to her doctor about it, unbearably, and he says that this is quite a common male reaction to pregnancy. Yes, either that, or it's the work I've been doing. And continued to do. Oh, you know how it is. You say: Enough with these busy bodies and goody two-shoes! And then you're out there again, doing what you can. After my fortnight's leave I completed a five-month tour of duty in the East with a Waff en SS unit, operating downwind, as it were, of the military withdrawal from the Soviet Union. I like to think we achieved a good deal, though it was humble stuff compared to the Kat-Zet. And crude stuff. And aesthetically catastrophic stuff too, of course. Emotion flits around me now. The world continues to make sense, but emotion isn't so interested in sense, and wonders how things feel. . . . My face, during this time, can best be imagined as a study in strain. Rather as it looked when I lay there in the dark, wedged between the changed Herta and the cold wall, in full confidence of erotic failure. Then it hap ens—
it doesn't happen—and you switch on the light and get dressed sadly. The sadness is your very own; it entirely fits you. And Herta's glance sometimes, and her mother's glance, and even her father's glance, which is hard and countervailing, which is on my side (but I don't want it): these glances say that in my hands there rests a mortal and miserable power. I am omnipotent. Also impotent. I am powerful and powerless.
It was a summer of thunder and sunshine and double rainbows. These were epiphanies. I finally encountered the bomb baby, thus fulfilling the ironic prophecy of my dreams. And with my own eyes I saw the stalled clock at Treblinka. . . .
What the unit was doing could, I suppose, be seen as a natural continuation of my work in the Lager. We were on the interface of bureaucracy and public relations. At this point the Jews were being deconcentrated, were being channeled back into society, and it fell to us to help dismantle and disperse the ghettos, where the light was always failing and where the children all looked so old and full of knowledge, and everybody moved much too slowly or much too fast. Even as an interim measure, the ghettos, one felt, were a failure, and made one suspect, briefly yet sickeningly, that the whole enterprise, the whole dream, had been fatally grandiose: too many, too many. How one longed to uproot those walls. . . . One ghetto, that of Litzmannstadt, had a "king": Chaim Rumkowski. I myself saw him parading through the stunned streets, with courtiers, in his carriage, pushed by a white horse like a paper bag full of water and bones. Rumkowski was a lord. But a lord of what?
Well, we pitched in, ferrying the people back to their villages and so on. Logistics. But the work also had its creative dimension. We used vans, vans marked with th Red
Cross; and machine guns; and dynamite. I turned out to have a modest talent for neuropsychiatry. The men to whom I gave counseling (and prescribed sedatives) would, for a while, complain of nightmares, anxiety, and dyspepsia—but they all recovered by the end of the tour. The measures to which we were sometimes reduced were distressingly inelegant, and, in those cases where dynamite was used, required hours of backbreaking preparation. But this was our mission, after all: to make Germany whole. To heal her wounds and make her whole.
One morning of diagonal sleet and frozen puddles we were unloading some Jewish families at a rude hamlet on the River Bug. It was the usual sequence: we'd picked up this batch from the mass grave, in the woods, and stood waiting by the van on the approach road while the carbon monoxide went about its work. All my men were dressed as doctors, with their white smocks, their dangling stethoscopes, their talk and their laughter and their cigarettes, waiting for the familiar volley of shouts and thumps from within. I myself toyed with a philosophical perfecto. . . . We then drove them closer to town, where one of our men was readying the piles of clothes. Out they all filed. Among them was a mother and a baby, both naked, naturally, for now. The baby was weeping in a determined, muscular, long-haul rhythm, probably from earache. Its mother already looked exasperated by these cries. Indeed she looked stunned— stopped dead in the face. For a moment I wondered if she'd fully come round from the carbon monoxide. I was concerned.
We then escorted this group of about thirty souls into a low warehouse littered with primitive sewing machines and spindles and bolts of cloth. Normally, now, one would have to chivy them off into their cellars and outhouses. But hese
Jews, led by the weeping baby, made their solemn way past a series of curtains and blankets suspended from the ceiling and, one by one, backed their way through a missing panel in the wall. This panel I myself replaced with a softly spoken "Guten Tag." I don't know. I was moved, by their continued silence, by the baby's muffled cries. "Raus! Raus!" I shouted—to the men, who romped off to explore the premises, and to lay out some trinkets, and some food, some bread and tomatoes, say, as was traditional, for the Jews' later use. "Raus! Raus! Raus!" But I remained alone in the still warehouse, crouched by the wall, and listening. Listening? To the baby's weeping, and to the sound that perhaps the whole planet makes when it tries to soothe: "Schh . . . Schh." Hush now. I tiptoed away, and joined the men. Quiet. Best to leave them to it. Schh. This may be the way they soothe their young. Thirty souls in
the black gap, saying Schh . . . The baby, then, was clearly much loved. But of course it had no power at all.
Finally Treblinka, on which we paid a brief courtesy call as we journeyed homeward through northern Poland to the Reich. This place too was already half-dismantled, its work done. As with Auschwitz, no memorial would mark the spot. But I wasn't too late. I got to see the famous "railway station"—which was a prop, a facade. Looked at sideways on, it rose like a splint into the winter sky. The idea was, of course, to reassure the Jews—the Jews of Warsaw, Radom, and the Bialystok districts whom the camp had serviced. There were signs and so on, saying, Restaurant and Ticket Office and Telephone, and informing passengers where to change for their onward journey, and a clock. Every station, every journey, needs a clock. When we passed it, on our way to inspect the gravel pits, the big hand was on twelve and the little hand was on four. Which was incorrect! An error, a mistake: it was exactly 13:27. But we p ssed
again, later, and the hands hadn't moved to an earlier time. How could they move? They were painted, and would never move to an earlier time. Beneath the clock was an enormous arrow, on which was printed: Change Here For Eastern Trains. But time had no arrow, not here.
Indeed, at the railway station in Treblinka, the four dimensions were intriguingly disposed. A place without depth. And a place without time.
Herta continues to be very good, or at least very silent, about my impotence. After my tour, I didn't expect to hit top form right away. But this is ridiculous. It seems that the work I do takes so much of what is essential in me that there is nothing left. Nothing for Herta. In that sense I suppose I am making the ultimate sacrifice. During the counseling sessions some of the young troopers in the East mentioned impotence as being chief among their difficulties. My position there was simple: I told them not to worry about it. And that was a joke, because I was half-dead with worry myself. The bit of me, that is to say, that wasn't dead already: from impotence. Yes, most amusing, telling them they have to be hard (harte), that they have to be men (Menschen). And there you are, facing each other, two soggy zeros. Multiply zero, or anything else, by zero, and you still get zero. Furthermore, I've been doing my sums in another area and generally putting two and two together, and I figure that something has to happen before I'm reposted—to account for the baby. Our baby is a bomb, too: a time bomb. And if I don't do it ... Herta's belly has gone down now. I am no longer obliged to lurk limply behind her. These days I get to lurk limply on top of her. By my absence I am conspicuous. We don't talk about it anymore, thank God. But I'm assuming it's still noticed.
Amis, Martin - Time's Arrow (v1.0) Page 12
