It is nearly ten o’clock at night now, fully dark, and it has begun snowing again. I have not turned the lights on in my attic flat; I sit and watch the snow fall, some way back from the small gabled window overlooking the playground, and the dark beyond, where lies the forest. In some ways it would have been a relief to see his face.
Joined from across the Diaspora, as if to some black malign Jerusalem . . . once before, King Herod gathered a thousand innocents together and put them to the sword, in order that one Jew-child might die. Might not another such, a second Herod, seek in the death of six million the death of one? Anonymous, unrecognized: what face in the milling transports? Which of these children at the railhead ramps?
Last night came an intruder. Around one in the morning I heard a sound from downstairs, as someone might have left ajar a door, and the wind caught it. I was not asleep, but sitting up by the window in the dark, and I took my heavy torch—unlit, I do not need it to know my way—and checked the premises. There was a back door open in the kitchens, that I had thought was shut, and there was snow blown in by the doorway, but nothing further inside. I locked the door and bolted it, and walked the empty corridors, but there was no one. Perhaps it would be best to tell the police, but this I do not wish to do—not while there are such people nearby, in the woods.
This is the first time such things have bothered me, here. Before, when I lived in East Ham, there was a synagogue and burial ground nearby, and I was obliged to be cautious. I grew a beard, and that helped, but after coming here I shaved it off. Twenty years have passed; still one never knows. I feared as much when first began my wandering. Against memory one must always remain vigilant.
The rest of the day I spent in my room up in the attic, going out only to make my customary tour of the grounds. There were footsteps in the snow on the yard; during the night someone walked all around the outside of the school, pausing at the windows where the tracks are close and crowded. In my job it is not allowed to keep a dog; and yet a dog would give me protection. I am reminded of the dogs we kept in the Schwarze Korps: wolfhounds, and the snow would gather on their coats, and their panting breath would fog in the winter air as they barked and leaped and plunged on their leashes. And cordite and blood and rough tobacco, and the burning of brandy in the throat on a cold day, and after the gunshots and the screaming the great stillness of the Northern forests . . . what good is it to remember?
No good; but I cannot help it. The business with the gypsy has unnerved me. Thinking back the landlord was wrong; it was a Lithuanian, surely, from the accent, and a Jew. These matters were my speciality, at the university and in the Ahnenerbe. Why do you study such things, said the recruiting officer with distaste. Respectfully I drew the comparison with the doctor who must study disease, the better to stamp it out. This met with approval, and so I embarked on my mission, my specialized work: first in Berlin, then in Minsk and Smolensk with Nebe, and later in the Generalgouvernement. Who now knows of those days? Who shall judge?
It is late on in the afternoon now, and I have just been down to the boiler-room. All is well, but I find I do not like to linger there in the dark sheds. The glow of the pilot flame through the round hole in the iron door calls forth associations, and casts odd misshapen shadows on the dirty cobwebbed brick walls. While checking the pressure gauge I heard a high whistling sound
the sound of wind in tall trees
and this too held memories. The door to the boiler-room has a habit of sticking, and as I struggled to find the knack of opening it I felt almost as if someone were pressing from the other side. Of course there was no one—I have said this already. It would be easy to slip into unwholesome patterns of speculation. I must be always on my guard.
I am back in my room now, heating some soup for the evening meal, but I have no appetite. Outside it is already dark. The trees seem very near tonight, beyond the schoolyard fence.
Into the birch woods, where the world comes to an end; a track into the forest, where lies, they say, the village of Padernice. Before he comes to the end of the journey, each sees a different village, each pictures his own shtetl or its simulacrum, comfortingly familiar. Afterwards, it is the same for each. Soul by soul, the village is populated; day by day, truckload after truckload, the pilgrims embark for Padernice, and yet still the shtetl remains empty, a dream of streets and houses on a cold dark night. Such is the paradox.
A visit this morning from the headmaster, to make sure all is well, and to bring me a present of money and some Christmas foodstuffs. We made a tour of the building together, inside and outside, and he pointed out the footsteps. I lied, and said they were my tracks, from earlier that morning. “Strange,” he said; “they look almost like bare feet, see? Look, here, and here: it’s for all the world like toes. I hope you had your Wellingtons on—don’t want you getting frostbite, ha-ha!” So he sees it also.
Back at the main gate he shook my hand and prepared to depart in his car. “Take care over the holidays,” he said; “and try not to leave the place unattended after dark if you can help it. There are some strange people about, you know. Just the other day there were some rag-and-bone men in our neighborhood, foreigners by the sound of it; I don’t want to generalize or anything, but you can never be too careful.” Here he blushed, remembering to whom he was talking. I promised to keep watch, and asked him for details. “Oh, they were just tinkers, I suppose,” he said; “but they made my wife a little nervous—said she didn’t even dare answer the door when they came knocking, bless her! If they take to loitering around here you might telephone and let me know. I’m sure the police would look in if we asked them. Do you think I ought to have a word, and get them to put you on their beat?” I assured him there was no need to trouble the police, and that I would be vigilant. Of this necessity I have no need to be reminded.
Again there had been disturbances in the night. No doors were open this time, when I looked; but still I felt someone was in the building, and many times I made my circuit of the corridors before returning to my room. How strange it is, to walk where people walk when there is only stillness and dark. Before, it used not to bother me.
The wintry spell shows no sign of abating. Now as evening sets in the snow still falls; again I sit in the darkness of my room, showing no light. A while ago I turned on the radio, as a form of company. In my youth there was a romance to the radio: at night we would listen to the songs of far-off cities up and down the dial, even distant Moscow to the east, jangling balalaikas and the groaning dirge of the Volga boatmen. “Ach! The ferryman on the Styx!” my father would exclaim, and make me change the station. Tonight, though, I was disappointed. Beyond Christmas carols and brash pop songs I could find no music, but at the very end of the dial there seemed to be a play for voices. The reception was poor, and I could make out nothing distinctly, but after a while I was obliged to turn it off. I thought I heard the voice from that man in the snug, the Häftling, the rag-and-bone man: I thought he said, Padernice, though that was of course impossible.
Padernice, the impossible village. A rumor we created for good reason: it made them feel more comfortable, thinking they were being taken to a new town, a new ghetto, whose rules they could be sure of learning before long. A place in which they might hope to shelter from the storm; somewhere the furious withering wind might pass them by. Perhaps the guards would be kind, the rations more generous, perhaps there would be stoves in the barracks, and a synagogue. Is it so cruel, to give hope where none in truth exists? At any rate, it made our task, the task of the Einsatzgruppen, easier. Because I spoke their language, I would say to them, in Yiddish, Do not be afraid, nothing bad will happen to you. You are being taken to Padernice, sonderbehandlung, special treatment. Soon you will arrive at Padernice. And then the short ride out into the forest, and the pits.
Padernice was our invention. In all the Eastern lands, clear out to the chertá osédlosti, the Russian Pale of Settlement, such a place never existed. So how could the rag-and-bone man claim that h
e came from Padernice? He mumbled; his voice was indistinct; but I have replayed the scenario a thousand times in my mind, and I am more and more certain that was what he said, though nothing else about him is certain any more. I must analyse the situation, and think logically. Logically. From his tattoo, he was not of those we took into the forest with Einsatzgruppe B. The tattoo he could only have been given on arrival at the camps. Was it Birkenau, or Belzec, or Treblinka? Kulmhof was the closest; perhaps from Kulmhof; but there they did not tattoo . . . I was at Kulmhof only a few months, so perhaps I am safe. But it is useless to conjecture. I await the night with mounting apprehension; sleep is impossible.
Chełmno, known as Kulmhof, and the castle on the banks of the Narew; Treblinka in the forest, hard by Malkinia Junction on the Bug. Upstream, Sobibor; Belzec also. South, Oświęcim of the tall birch trees in the farmlands of the Vistula. Hundreds more; but remember these, by the rivers of Poland, strung along the black spiderweb of the railway tracks. Remember these citadels of horror and despair, these ghost towns; remember these capitals of night and fog.
And the rivers of the land flowed thick and clogged with ashes; here were burnings and torments without number. Here the children were forsaken, here, the covenant broken. A black year; a darkness upon Israel.
They are coming into the building at night—whoever, or whatever, they are. I do not know how long I can hold out.
Last night, Christmas Eve, I had hoped for carol singers, but no one came near; and then, after midnight, I heard them again, as I knew I would. Footsteps, or the echoes of footsteps, and once I thought voices, and when I dared at last to go downstairs, a disturbing thing, a terrible thing.
At the rear of the building, the side that faces the woods, there is a small gymnasium and a changing-room. Here if anywhere the sounds seemed to be congregated, but when I entered there was nothing, and again I was forced to ask myself what manner of thing it is that pursues me, and then eludes me at the last. Will it come to me, or must I seek it out? The faintest glimmer of light came through the small high windows, moonlight on snowfall; in the depth of the shadows I saw a coat hanging from a peg, and for a second I thought it—why cannot I say it, even to myself?
In a corner of the changing-room is the entrance to the showers, an open portal without doors. I hesitated a second on the threshold, then went into the inky blackness and the cold. A slight skim of ice on the tiles made it slippery underfoot, and I held on to the wall as I inched around the perimeter of the room in absolute darkness; no windows in the showers, and the skylight clogged with snow. The wall at my right; one corner left, then another, then another; so I shuffled round. One more corner; but then another, and another, and now panic, that was never far from me, took me over entirely. Round and round I stumbled, faster, heedless of slipping on the treacherous tiles, and there was no way out, no way back into the changing-room. All sense of direction, of location, was gone. How could the shower-room have become so large, so echoing? A square room, ten paces on a side; where was the portal? I let go of the wall, and advanced into the center of the room, arms outstretched, clutching at thin air. My spectacles slipped from my nose—even in that cold I was sweating, my skin entirely slick with sweat—and the lenses shattered, splinters and shards of glass chittering away across the tiles. Now I could hear the sound of a thin high wind, that was perhaps nothing but the blood rushing through my body
the devil in the chimney
and hissing in my eardrums. Desperately I cast about me for escape. I came up against something; for an instant I felt flesh, and hard bone close underneath, and I screamed out loud. The shock made me open my eyes—I had not realized they were shut—and I was outside, in the changing-room, flailing at the raincoat hanging from its peg.
They said Eichmann had help, but I have no one.
We sat down by the rivers of Babylon and wept there, remembering Zion; we hung up our harps on the willow-trees, when our captors cried out for a song. We must sing at our enemies’ pleasure; “A song,” they call out in their mockery, “a song, from the music of Zion’s house!” And shall we now sing the songs of the Lord in this stranger’s land?
O Jerusalem, should I forget thee, let the skills of my right hand wither and die; let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I cease to remember thee, if I love not Jerusalem dearer than heart’s content. Babylon, thou queen without mercy, blessed be he who deals to thee the measure thou hast dealt to us; blessed be he who will catch up thy children, and dash them against the rocks!
This song we sang in Babylon, and also in Padernice.
The furnace is out, but I cannot go down to it. How many days now since it began, the incident in the bar? How long will it last? Perhaps a thousand years, or perhaps only as long as memory lasts. In any case, longer than I have left. At first light I went to the front entrance, the gates, meaning to go into town, to be among people; but they were waiting at the foot of the driveway, and at last I knew what they are, that have tracked me down. Though without spectacles one thing runs into another, and my vision is treacherously blurred, still I recognized them; I knew them in an instant. How could I not know them? I am Horst Wageknecht, Sturmbannführer SS: it is my expertise.
They stood in amongst the trees, the dull stripes of their uniforms indistinguishable from the patterns of branches against the snow, from the iron railings that afford me no defense. What did the publican call them: rag-and-bone men? Rags and bones, but he could not have seen their eyes, that watched me from out of the shadows, from out of the past. Twenty years ago, and it seemed like yesterday, as if I never escaped, never left the forests of the East with my stolen identity, my dead man’s papers. Since two, three days, I have not eaten, and I was dizzy—I almost slipped, the mouth of a pit, an abyss, a freezing wind . . .
I did not fall; I managed to turn around and stumble back to the buildings. They did not follow me inside—of course they did not need to, they must know they have me trapped here. They wait out there, where the trees begin. Were I to look out now, they would be there. I dare not try the main entrance again. At the rear there is a smaller gate, and a path through the woods that comes out near houses and the shops, but I know there will be more of them in the woods. They are creatures of the woods, I think; perhaps we all are, had we only the courage to admit it. I had the idea to telephone for a taxi, but on the line there is only static, and strange faraway voices
whispering through the roofs and ridges
and so I am trapped. Perhaps if a thaw comes . . . overwhelmingly I associate them with the snow, the forests and the snow. Last night I was forced to this conclusion: none came back, that were sent to Padernice. If these made the journey, and yet came back, then what I fear is not exposure, or a show trial in Jerusalem at the hands of the Zionist hangmen. What I now fear, I can hardly name. That which comes out of the forest does not always have a name. My grandmother knew the names of many things, but there were those of whom even she would not speak. She put salt on the window-sills as protection, and I too have done this. If I had garlic, this too would be a protection; I try to imagine the taste of garlic in my mouth, but I can taste only blood.
Towards the afternoon I seem to have slept; but when I woke there was blood on my sheets and my head ached. I may have passed out, and struck my head against the wall. For a while I could only sit on the edge of my bed, and wait for my balance to return. The room was bitterly cold; of course the heating is off—have I said this?—but also I saw the sash window was open, six or seven centimeters at the bottom. Grasping the metal frame of the bed for support I went to close it, and there I saw the saucer overturned, and the pile of salt scattered on the window-sill. There were marks in the spilled salt, that seemed to be letters traced with a finger. My head was swimming, and I could not read them, but the words were clear when I retraced them with my own finger, they said, Komm mit uns, that is, Come with us.
These are not men. These are not the Untermenschen I feared at first, not even the starved and
shuffling Mussulmänner of my memories. My mind refuses to make the last, the obvious connection. I am very weak now; I do not know how long I can hold out.
Kaddish for Daniel Hirsch, in the lime pits at Bialystok; and for Avraham Waksszul, torn by the dogs at Majdanek. Kaddish for the cantor Samuel Osterweil, who held the scrolls of holy Torah while the jackboots rained down on him. Kaddish for Mania Prilutzka, ten days alone in the cellar without food or water, and the villagers heaped logs on the trapdoor when she cried. Kaddish for Moshe Spiegelmann, who stole a loaf of bread; kaddish for Filip Lustig, who stepped forward in his defence, and for Yuter Springer, who cried out. Kaddish for Maurycy Naftel, left on the gallows for seven days, by way of an example. Kaddish for Lucie Berger, fifth in line on the morning Appel, and the guards counted every fifth head. Kaddish for Binyamin Handelsman, who told his eight-year-old grandson Meyer, Sei still, ’s ist nur eine Dusche, hab’ keine Angst, be calm, it’s only a shower, don’t panic. Kaddish for the column of prisoners marched out of the camp at Lieberose, April 1945, and never seen again. Kaddish for the face at the cattle-truck door, the round haunted eyes staring, pleading into the camera lens. Kaddish for Berta Fishbein, a name chalked on a suitcase, the address of an empty house in the suburbs of Berlin, where the birds cry on the dark and rippling lake. Kaddish for the ones who were not even left their names, for the ones without remembrance. Kaddish in the empty synagogue, in the darkness of a winter’s night.
Ghosts: Recent Hauntings Page 22
