Forty-one forty-two forty-three four five six seven eight nine fifty! Breathe! Fifty-one fifty-two three four . . .
He was walking in the middle of the street, stamping at each step, panting as he counted his paces: seven, eight, fifty-nine, sixty! Breathe! Sixty-one, two, three – why was he counting? He wanted to know how many paces it was from the main gate to the end, from the entry to the end until the exit from the end; he wanted to grasp the dimensions of this place, this camp thoroughfare that seemed infinitely long, the road to infinity. The road lay snow-white and innocent before him, the entire vast area snow-white and innocent; why do we associate white with innocence, even here, in this place, the colour of murderous cold beneath the deathly light of the winter sun. Breath steaming from the mouth with each counted step, six seven eight sixty-nine seventy! Icy wind blew into his face.
Martin Susman felt a gentle pressure on his shoulder, seventy-one, seventy-two, seventy . . . a hand on his shoulder: Please fasten your seatbelt!
He gave a start and opened his eyes. Yes, he said, of course!
The return flight from Kraków to Brussels. Was he panting? He was breathing heavily. He fastened his belt, reached for the air vent nozzle and turned it on full. His eyes closed again, he felt cold sweat on his forehead and shivered. Of course he had caught a cold. He had worried about this trip; only with great reluctance and caution had he readied himself for his visit to the memorial site and museum, for fear of the shock of seeing the indescribable. But death is destroyed when it becomes a museum piece, while familiarity precludes the shock of recognition. The vending machines selling warm drinks or chocolate bars for ten zloty had shocked him more than the heaps of hair, shoes and spectacles he had seen so often in photographs and documentaries. Worst of all was the cold. It got everywhere, into his skin, into his bones, the icy gusts in the long corridor of history. In the Auschwitz marquee it had been just about bearable, but Birkenau was merciless; never before in his life had he been so cold. His grandmother had always worn multiple layers and said, “Those who stay warm stay alive!” Even in the stalls, with the warmth of the animals, she would stand there wearing all those layers. And when it was freezing she used to say, “You could catch your death of cold in this!” On the trip home to his heated Brussels apartment Susman felt embarrassed by this memory, as if he’d said aloud to the person next to him: I caught my death of cold in Birkenau. Absolutely freezing, it was! What can I say? I caught my death of cold.
He sniffed. His nose was blocked. He yawned – a kind of a greedy gasp for air – then began to doze again. He had the aisle seat in a row of three. He heard the voices of the two women next to him as if from a distance, as if from his memory. They were speaking German, cheerfully and excitedly.
He saw himself making his way along the camp road once more, panting, counting his paces as if obsessed, bracing himself against the wind, bent forwards, clouds closing the sky like heavy eyelids, the vast expanse of white turning ash grey. He sensed everything inside him giving in, he didn’t resist the feeling, his head sank to his chest. Then he felt an upwind, he felt as if he were being carried upwards, losing the ground beneath his feet, he was flying. He was surprised that he could fly, but he also had an odd confidence, somehow it was logical and quite natural to rise so easily, disembodied, into the air. Was anybody watching? He wished the whole world were looking up and watching him as he flew skywards, circling and rocking in the air currents as he rose up to the clouds. He heard the German voices, so near, so far, talking about something completely different, art, literature, books, and he saw open books ascending like birds, their song filled the air as he gazed down at the large expanse. From above – this was first semester archaeology – you could see beneath the surface of the earth, you saw into a depth you didn’t notice when you walked across the earth. When you walk and look around you, you see a snow-covered expanse. If you fly over it, you see structures, areas marked off from each other, the expanse breaks up into a grid of fields. The surface reacts differently, depending on what lies beneath it – untouched earth, or the interred debris of civilisations, bodies, stones from sunken buildings, water courses or ancient cellars and canal systems, or buried septic tanks and latrines – the vegetation grows more lushly, or sparsely. The more history there is, the more differentiated is each field from a bird’s eye perspective. In the thin layer of earth over the stones of sunken civilisations, vegetation grows less luxuriantly than over a mass grave, where grass sprouts as you would expect it to: grass grows over it quickly! But even across an expanse of snow, differences become visible: with untouched earth the ground temperature is different from that of a thin layer of soil lying on top of stones or decayed wood or over a mass grave. For decades the decomposition process of dead bodies warms the earth, meaning that there the snow is icy, here it is crusted, and right over there it is translucent and already thawing. Anyone flying over it can see these grids and knows where to dig.
In his mind he saw Professor Krinzinger, his former teacher, saying, Modern archaeology begins with flying, not digging!
And then the professor was flying at his side, shouting something to him. What? The droning in the air was so loud that Martin couldn’t understand him at first. He saw the professor pointing downwards and shouting something.
What?
Down! Down!
Now he understood: Come down! We have another task. We archaeologists have to excavate civilisation, not crimes!
But —
We’re on shaky ground, but we’ll tread firmly in our boots, we’ll stamp the ground until it’s firm, even at a gentle pace each step is a pounding, all that matters is that our feet are warm. Martin saw boots, warm boots everywhere – and now he heard more clearly the women’s voices that had been in his ear the whole time.
I thought it was quite a good novel, but the dream sequences got on my nerves.
It’s a classic.
Yes, and that’s why I wanted to read it. But I don’t like dreams in novels. She keeps dreaming something, which is then described in the minutest detail, it’s completely surreal. But it’s supposed to be poetic. For me, what a character sees and experiences I can understand. But dreams —
But in the novel they’re living under fascism. It’s only natural they should have nightmares.
Look, whenever there’s a dream in a book I just want to go straight to sleep myself.
Martin saw all these boots, warm and comfy, a class of German schoolchildren on an excursion to Auschwitz. A teacher: Thorsten! What’s wrong with you? Wake up! Come over and join the rest of us!
Two young people are speaking Turkish. A teacher asks them not to speak Turkish here, one of them replies, What, do you expect us to speak German? Here?
Martin felt giddy. It was as if he were spinning around, faster and faster, everything around him blurred, just occasionally an image flashed up, he heard a sentence, someone said something about coke, a pupil asked, What kind of coke?
An announcement. This is your captain speaking. Please fasten your belts as we’re encountering some turbulence.
Martin Susman is standing outside the crematorium at Auschwitz I. He has seen the gas chambers, the incineration ovens, everything looks exactly like it does in the photographs he knows, black-and-white photographs, and what he has seen here for real is actually in black and white. He felt . . . how? He couldn’t say, he couldn’t find the word for it, because “shocked” was no longer a German word, it was a sort of sticking plaster for the German soul. This was an idea, but in his dream he could see it with his own eyes. He was standing outside the building, lighting a cigarette. All of a sudden two uniformed men hurried over to him, one slapped the hand holding his cigarette and the other said something in Polish, then in English: No smoking here!
A badge dangled from Martin’s chest: “GUEST OF HONOUR / GOSC HONOROWY / EHRENGAST in Auschwitz”. He held out the badge to the men in uniform, then Mr Żeromski came running over and called out, Herr Doktor, Herr Doktor,
we have to go into the marquee! The ceremony is about to begin.
He woke up because the aircraft was shaking, dipping and shuddering. A child screamed.
The following day he called in sick. He stayed at home for five days. For three of these he had a fever. On the fifth day he jotted down his idea and drew up a preliminary plan for the Jubilee Project.
Five
Memories are no less reliable than
anything else we conceive.
LOVE IS A fiction. Fenia Xenopoulou had never understood the fuss people made over love. She regarded this feeling as an unproven phenomenon in another world, like water on Mars. People read about it in those colourful magazines such as Xrisi Kardia or Loipón – the love affairs of Hollywood actors and popstars, the dream marriages of princesses. Some thought love possible because they had longed for it, but everybody Fenia knew had surrendered at some point. Once at the hairdresser her mother had said of the luckless Lady Diana, “What she never got, I never got much more cheaply!”
As far as she knew, no-one in Fenia’s family had ever been in love. In the emphatic sense that an abundance of emotion had resulted in a wedding, or that unrequited feelings had been the cause of a tragedy. All except for Uncle Kostas, her father’s elder brother, who she had never met, but who lived on in family stories as the madman who met his death because of his undying love for a woman. This contradiction had greatly troubled Fenia as a child: death from undying love. In hindsight, he probably hadn’t featured as prominently in conversation as she had thought, but what she’d heard must have particularly fired her imagination, and terrified her. Uncle Kostas had fallen in love to the point of obsession, and because he couldn’t win over the object of his veneration he went to join the resistance. At the word “veneration”, young Fenia couldn’t help thinking of the Virgin Mary and religious ecstasy; perhaps that wasn’t so wide of the mark. But at the time she had been more interested in the word “resistance”. She didn’t know which war or civil war had been raging then, it was before she was born, and so for her it was as distant as the Peloponnesian War she was learning about around that time at school or soon afterwards. Uncle Kostas, it was said, “hadn’t come back”. In her imagination the “uncle in the resistance” was in an underworld where the dead – there because of their undying love – fought against this disaster called love and veneration. She had pictured this underworld as a dark place, very muggy and damp, and dangerous in an indeterminate way – certainly not a place she was in a hurry to visit, however desperate she was to escape her sun-scorched Cypriot village and that stony, barren land with its miserable olive trees, their silvery shimmer a mere deception, a fraudulent beauty for other people, for delighted tourists whose money allowed the village to survive, because it could no longer survive on the olives themselves. The tourists came to be led up to the “Baths of Aphrodite”. The water from this spring supposedly gave those who bathed in it eternal youth. Here was where the Goddess of Love had frolicked with Adonis. This visitor attraction was no more than an unassuming natural pool in the cliffs above the village. It was almost always dried up, and beside it was a large wooden sign that read:
NON-POTABLE WATER
PLEASE DO NOT SWIM
The tourists would photograph the dry pool with the sign, and laugh. So those were the disciples of the Goddess of Love. After school Fenia sold them mineral water she had hauled up the mountain in two cooler bags. She saved up. She wanted out.
It was years before she realised that her uncle really had been dead for ages, had fallen as a partisan and was buried somewhere. Partisans, she now thought, were people who refused to acknowledge reality. In that respect they had much in common with those who were in love. She thought it crazy, completely crazy, to fight as a Greek man against Greek generals instead of retaliating against the Turks who had occupied half the island.
Fenia had a different idea of happiness, and of the battle she would fight in order to gain it. She wanted to get away. Far away. As a Greek Cypriot with the corresponding papers she had the opportunity to study in Greece. She wanted to go to Athens. With her meagre savings, Fenia’s mother facilitated her plan. Did Fenia love her mother? She knew that ultimately it was all about interest, and interest on the interest: about the money she would send home after successfully completing her studies. The entire family flexed their muscles. This was the definition of love that Fenia understood. With small gifts and a good deal of pig-headedness her father called on people he knew, who themselves knew other people, and managed to arrange for Fenia passage on a ship from Limassol to Lavrio. It was a cargo ship that didn’t take passengers. The captain agreed to have Fenia on board, tolerated as a kind of stowaway. The ferry would have been too expensive and a flight was entirely out of the question. She then had to make her own way from Lavrio to Athens. It wasn’t hard, as there was one lorry after another on this stretch of road. You’ll have to pay with sex, a friend had predicted. Fenia didn’t pay. The drivers let a pretty young girl into their cabs, but then found a redoubtable, icy woman on the passenger seat beside them. In Athens she stayed with distant relatives. The price of family solidarity increased with distance. Her relatives asked for too high a “contribution to her board”, far more than previously agreed by letter. Her budget, hers and her mother’s savings, melted away too quickly. She wasn’t allowed to take anything from the fridge that she had not bought herself, even though she was paying a contribution to her board. If the family were having meat in the evenings she only got vegetables and potatoes, and eventually the lamb bone, if there was anything left on it. She felt humiliated, but was too proud to relay this home. She kept her rucksack packed and looked around. A fellow student took her to “Spilia tou Platona”, the fashionable haunt of the Chrysi Neolaia, Athens’ “gilded youth”.
Isn’t it expensive?
Yes, but we’ll invest only in one drink! And then the men are bound to pay! All the most interesting men hang out at the Spilia!
There she met a lawyer, Dr Jorgos Boutopoulos, and she was soon calling him Booty. It was never clear whether this was just her pet version of his surname, or an allusion to the Nazi sweethearts branded “German booty” back in the day. Jorgos Boutopolous had inherited the law practice his grandfather had taken over during the Nazi occupation, after the Jewish lawyer it belonged to was deported. But Fenia knew nothing of this. And she overestimated Jorgos. She fetched her rucksack and moved in with him. In her eyes he was a man of the world, a true sophisticate. Fifteen years her senior, generous, a man who could discuss French wines with waiters in expensive restaurants. She came very close to believing that fairy-tale love did exist after all. They got married. At the wedding Fenia had to laugh when in his speech Booty talked of “eternal love”. It sounded like a schmaltzy feature straight out of Xrisi Kardia, the “Golden Romance” rag. And he did, in fact, sell the wedding photographs to the magazine, but all that appeared was a short article – half a page with a couple of pictures. Later it emerged that “sold” was not quite accurate; he had paid for the coverage!
How proud Fenia’s parents were. But they began to worry when soon afterwards they discovered she was unhappy. They weren’t so concerned for Fenia herself, rather for her marriage. The magic of this union was fading all too soon. When she surrendered herself to Booty in the jacuzzi in his apartment, it struck her with unbearable clarity how insipid the whole thing was. He was so proud of his jacuzzi, but rather than enjoy the luxury he had managed to secure for himself, he preferred being able to impress with it. He revelled in the symbols of a privileged life, but not in the life itself, he was delighted that he – he – possessed this beautiful young woman, he was in love with himself, and Fenia soon felt that she was interchangeable. He believed he was “making love”, a phrase she found more ridiculous than every one of its vulgar variations, but he was making love only to himself.
Through him she gained entry to different social circles where she realised that, rather than the big shot he had first made hi
mself out to be, he was an anxious conformist, a bootlicker who smarmed up to the seriously rich, in effect a shyster who earned enough from the foul fish he landed to believe he was one step away from serious money and power.
When Fenia began to shut herself off from him, Booty realised that he did love her after all. He demonstrated this with passionate remonstrations, a neurotic separation anxiety that he regarded as proof of his love, and by an emotional upheaval so tempestuous it could have been mistaken for a murderous rage. Fenia was particularly livid that he should demand her gratitude. That was madness: demanding gratitude from other people after you’ve satisfied yourself!
It was true that, financially, he had made her student life more comfortable, but she would have managed without him, whereas without Fenia he would have had less fun and certainly less kudos in his circle of acquaintances, the way he had dolled her up and paraded her about. As a student of economics, she found this balance sheet didn’t add up. And even without his help she had secured the grant for England, which was her escape. She wanted to get out, go far away.
Theirs became a weekend marriage, with ever increasing intervals, first in London and then in Brussels. The last time she saw him in her bed, when she woke up to his sweaty grey locks, his face bloated by alcohol, she thought: He’s more of a stranger to me today than when I first met him.
A good definition of the end, she thought. Time to boot him out of her life.
Fenia was buoyed by such thoughts. At breakfast that morning she was happier and more relaxed than she’d been in ages. Because everything was now perfectly clear. And this was the moment when even Booty showed a touch of class. He didn’t misread the situation, he seemed liberated too, in a witty mood, and as he exited her apartment with his wheelie suitcase he said, Love is a fiction.
The Capital Page 11
