Nothing is alright, Bohumil said again, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. So I went there, to my sister’s house. She wanted me to shake her husband’s hand. And then he refused. I offered him my hand and he refused to shake it. Ignored it. He looked at me with his fat, self-satisfied face, his hands in his trouser pockets, and said, Y smrade zasranej!
What?
Tu es un crétin d’idiot!
Non! Ce n’est pas vrai!
It is! I’d been bought by corporations, he said, in return for an exorbitant salary I was betraying the national interests of the Czech Republic, I was a parasite on the nation and so on. All that in the hallway of their house. Next to the coat hooks.
So what did you say? What did you do?
Bohumil laughed, sniffed and said, What did I do? Took my hand back. And then I said to my sister, If we go on chatting too long in the hallway the duck will burn. And she said, There isn’t any duck. We just wanted to get things straight.
Kassándra squeezed him, pulled him to her bosom, stroked his head. It was ridiculous: she was stroking his cycling helmet.
All of a sudden a man was standing there, bellowing at them. The owner of the car they were sitting on. Bohumil looked up, took a sticker from his shoulder bag, slowly and deliberately peeled off the back and slapped the sticker on the man’s forehead. The man staggered backwards, Bohumil picked up his bike and said to Kassándra, Come on! We have to get to work!
Kassándra was amazed at how quickly she was back in the saddle, and now they were pedalling hard and in silence. It wasn’t until they got to avenue des Arts that Bohumil said, My sister is five years younger than me. When she was at school I used to do her homework. Nobody said she was stupid or lazy. She was the princess. Now she’s pregnant with the child of a fascist. And nobody in the family is batting an eyelid. He’s nice to the relatives, sings old folk songs in a tuneful voice, he’s quite a handsome chap, he earns well and he’s not a communist. That’s what counts in my country these days.
Kassándra didn’t know how to respond. Only when they had arrived, locked up their bikes and were on their way to the lift did she say, I should tell you about my weekend too.
Two salamanders were standing by the lift. They greeted Kassándra and Bohumil with effusive politeness, the lift door opened and one of the salamanders said, It’s the third floor, isn’t it?
Yes, Kassándra said, the salamander pressed buttons three and six and asked cheerfully, Did you have a nice weekend?
My weekend was crap, Bohumil said.
Kassándra felt a frisson, a cheeky, crazy urge, and to her surprise said, Yes, and Monday’s been crap so far too!
Oh!
The lift floated upwards, it was very slow, cruelly slow given the situation. Bohumil said, And this lift is crap too.
Kassándra giggled. To herself.
At the third floor Bohumil and Kassándra got out.
Bonne journée!
Bonne journée!
Bohumil laughed. Kassándra said, I’m glad to see you laughing again. Now I want to tell you about my weekend. You and Xeno. It’s important. And you’ll be surprised.
Fenia Xenopoulou was already at her desk with a cup of coffee from the canteen. The forecast was for another oppressively hot day, the window was open, and already now, at eight o’clock in the morning, the air was warm, but Fenia Xenopoulou seemed to be freezing. She clutched her coffee with both hands as if trying to warm herself. But perhaps that was habit. She wasn’t cold, or if she was, then only emotionally. She had a hangover. Not a physical hangover, but a moral one. She had spent the night with Fridsch and to begin with hadn’t been able to tell him that . . . in the end she had – much too late, when it was no longer the right moment – made the suggestion that . . . and he . . . dozing off . . . and she . . . holding her coffee with both hands and feeling ashamed that then she . . . she had held the pillow over his face and . . . she just wanted to see if he was capable of any more emotion, or are men incapable of emotion when all the protein has gone? He thrashed about, knocked her away, screamed, and she burst into tears . . . well, then he took her in his arms and . . .
Kassándra came into the room, why was she so wired? We need to talk, have you got a moment, it’s important, for the Jubilee Project, oh, you’ve got coffee, good idea, I’ll get one too and tell Bohumil, is it O.K. to meet back here in ten?
Have you got a cigarette?
No, I don’t smoke. If you want to smoke we’d better go to Bohumil’s office, he disabled that thing on the ceiling, you can smoke in his room without the alarm going off.
A quarter of an hour later they were sitting in Bohumil’s office, Kassándra had fetched coffee for everybody. For the first time in public Xeno smoked three cigarettes, one after the other, while Kassándra talked about the Dossin barracks in Mechelen.
Kassándra loved going places by train at the weekends. She adored the fact that “from Brussels everything is so close”, as she liked to put it – her Europe: you were in Paris in less than ninety minutes, in London in two and a half hours, and in Cologne or Amsterdam in less than two. Sometimes she left early on Sunday morning and came back that evening, sometimes she left on Saturday and spent the night away. She would visit museums and galleries, meet friends in bistros and occasionally treat herself to a nice little number from a boutique. That weekend, however, she had taken a regional train rather than the Thalys and gone to Mechelen, only thirty kilometres away, less than half an hour from Brussels.
In Le Soir she had read an obituary of Gustave Jakubowicz, the famous Brussels lawyer who had also played an important role in the history of the European Court of Human Rights. The man was a legend, highly active until recently, until he had died at the age of almost ninety. What had particularly caught Kassándra’s attention was the line about the obituary’s author: “Jean Nebenzahl, academic staff member at the Documentation Centre on the Holocaust and Human Rights in Mechelen”. During the Nazi occupation the Dossin barracks had been the S.S.’s transit camp in Belgium, from where Jews, Roma and resistance fighters were deported to Auschwitz. Kassándra was aware that the barracks were now a museum, but she didn’t know that there was a research centre too, an academic institution that was methodically examining the history of deportations to Auschwitz. She wrote an e-mail to Jean Nebenzahl, who replied promptly. He would be very happy to meet Kassándra on Sunday, show her around the exhibition and answer any questions she might have as best he could.
Kassándra was a dedicated official. She went to Mechelen and met Jean Nebenzahl because she thought it might be of interest to the Jubilee Project. It would never have occurred to her to put in for overtime for these hours, or even to wait for her excursion to be “approved as a work trip” for which she could claim expenses afterwards. It interested her, it was a Sunday outing which would give her the opportunity to see something new, learn something, and if it proved helpful for their project, then so much the better.
Jean Nebenzahl was a dedicated academic. Of course he would make himself available on a Sunday, “outside his working hours”, if someone from the European Commission came to Mechelen because they had taken an interest in his work. It was becoming ever more difficult to interest people in the work being carried out at this research centre, let alone to secure funding for it. He was touched, therefore, by the curiosity shown by this European official whom he’d Googled at once: area of activity – photographs.
You don’t need to thank me, he said, I mean, I’m not some sort of soulless bureaucrat, even if I do sit at Eggert Reeder’s desk in this building. Who was he? He was the head of the German military administration in Belgium, he organised the deportation of more than thirty thousand Jews to Auschwitz. After the war he was sentenced to twelve years imprisonment and was then pardoned by Konrad Adenauer. All he did was sit at a desk. He wasn’t responsible for the murder of Jews in Auschwitz. He just wrote their names on lists during his office hours so they could be delivered to the slaughterhouse in a
n organised fashion. He never worked overtime, he was definitely not a fanatic. After his pardon he received a civil servant’s pension in the Federal Republic of Germany. And today I sit at his desk and work with these lists.
Jean Nebenzahl was a good-looking man, around Kassándra’s age, and physically a very similar type to her: not thin. Kassándra didn’t trust gaunt men; they tended to be ascetics – rigid and joyless. But Jean wasn’t fat either. Kassándra found fat men shapeless, unattractive and lacking self-control, but one ought not to generalise, so Kassándra suspected that most fat men, or at least many of them, had let themselves go. Jean was simply a man, tall, strong . . . and yet soft, that was how she regarded what he himself would have described as “a bit too snug”. And she was entranced by his brown eyes and curly black hair.
Why should we be interested in the fact that you’ve fallen in love? Xeno said.
There were only two chairs in Bohumil’s office: the desk chair and a visitor’s chair. Bohumil had offered his desk chair to Xeno, but she preferred to stand. With irritation writ across her face she looked down at Kassándra, who was sitting on the visitor’s chair. Kassándra leaped up. Don’t you understand? I thought I spelled it out clearly enough! They. Have. Got. The. Lists! In Mechelen! The archive of the S.S. intelligence agency responsible for the deportations is preserved in its entirety. We’ve been corresponding with the entire world while all the time it’s been here under our very noses. Thirty minutes away by train! Now I know how many Auschwitz survivors are still living and I’ve even got their names.
How many are there?
Sixteen, Kassándra said.
Sixty?
Sixteen!
Sixteen? Worldwide?
If they were on the deportation lists and later were registered as survivors, i.e. if there’s some sort of record of them and they’re known, then yes.
Are there contact addresses?
Jean said not all of them are up to date. With some there’s been no regular contact. But basically, yes.
And in what – how shall I put it? – state? I mean, how is their health . . . I mean, could they travel, and appear in public?
Five are known to make regular appearances in schools or as part of other history eyewitness programmes.
Five?
Yes. And one is a special case. A certain David de Vriend. And he lives here in Brussels. Jean said that if he understood our project correctly then this de Vriend would be our ideal eyewitness.
Why?
Not only is he one of the last Auschwitz survivors, he’s also the last living Jew from the legendary 20th deportation train to Auschwitz. This was the only deportation train that was ambushed by resistance fighters and stopped out in the open. They used pliers to cut the wire that secured the locks on the cattle-wagon doors, slid them open and called to the Jews to jump out and escape. Anybody who jumped got fifty francs and the address of a secure place to stay. Most of them were frightened, scared of being shot by the Germans if they tried to escape. They stayed on the train which, after a brief exchange of fire between the resistance fighters and S.S. guards, continued on its way. All those who didn’t jump went straight to the gas chamber on arrival at Auschwitz. But de Vriend was one of those who jumped.
But you said he was in Auschwitz.
The escape happened in April 1943. He was taken to a family in a village – he can’t remember the name – who claimed he was a nephew from Brussels. He was very young at the time and seriously traumatised: his parents had stayed on the train. He could have waited for the end of the war with the family who had taken him in, but he wanted to fight, perhaps to liberate his parents? In June 1944 he joined the resistance group “Europe libre” as its youngest member, this was the group around Richard Brunfaut, you might have heard of him – you’ll know rue Brunfaut at least. The group was legendary for its daredevil missions, but also because it differed politically from all the other resistance groups: it was the only one that was committed to a free Europe – as its name suggested – rather than just a free Belgium. After the war, after the victory over the Nazis, they wanted the abolition of the Belgian monarchy and the establishment of a European Republic. Until the end of their lives, Brunfaut and his comrades involved themselves in the struggle against the fascist regimes in Spain and Portugal too, against Franco and Salazar, who curiously the victorious powers had forgotten after liberating Europe. Anyway, in August 1944 David de Vriend was betrayed, arrested and deported to Auschwitz. He wasn’t sent to the gas chamber because he was young and strong. He survived the months until liberation. After the war he became a teacher. He didn’t just make the occasional appearance in schools as a historical eyewitness like many other survivors, he wanted to become a teacher so that every day he could be looking after the next generation. He didn’t want to be an eyewitness, he wanted to be an educator. If we’re going to stick with Martin’s idea – and we do, after all, have the president’s consent – then this man must be at the very centre of our celebrations. He’s got everything: a victim of racism, a resistance fighter, a victim of collaboration and betrayal, a witness of the extermination camp, a visionary of a post-national Europe founded on human rights, history and the lessons from history all rolled into one, in the person of this teacher.
Very nice, Xeno said. What rousing intensity. There’s just one small problem.
Madame Joséphine was worried about de Vriend. She was a fair woman who liked to treat all her “charges”, as she called them, as equally as possible, whether she found them nice, unpleasant or even repellent, whether they were communicative or gruff, friendly or aggressive. Joséphine believed that they all had good reasons for being the way they were here, biographical reasons that manifested themselves explicitly in this place, when they understood that in the Maison Hanssens they had nothing to do but doze their way to the end of their lives, even if they did behave as if they were guests in a spa hotel.
All the people she looked after were at the end of their life, but not yet finished with it. This was Joséphine’s experience, her insight. Every day she tried to imagine what this meant. For each individual person. In this respect they were all the same, and in their sameness she no longer differentiated between low-maintenance and more troublesome charges, friendly and unfriendly ones. David de Vriend had never shown the need to communicate with her more than was necessary. And if he thanked her for something it sounded more like a dismissal than a manifestation of gratitude. De Vriend wasn’t, therefore, one of those charges you couldn’t help loving and who you wanted to spoil extravagantly with your attention. And yet Joséphine felt that she had a particular responsibility for Monsieur de Vriend. Was this because of the number on his arm? She wondered about this and at the same time wouldn’t allow herself to entertain the thought. She was fair, equally considerate to them all. Life had played its game with each of them.
And so, with the best of intentions, she stormed into de Vriend’s room with two newspapers and shouted, You never come —
De Vriend sat in the armchair wearing only his underpants.
I haven’t seen you in the common room for days, Joséphine bellowed, where the newspapers are. But we have to read the papers, don’t we, Monsieur de Vriend? Or don’t we want to know what’s going on in the world? No, no, we do want to know, we want to remain cu-ri-ous, don’t we, Monsieur de Vriend? What do you prefer, Monsieur de Vriend? Le Soir or De Morgen? I think you’re a De Morgen reader, aren’t you? Now we’re going to read and give our little grey cells a bit of training, alright? De Vriend’s apathy naturally got on Joséphine’s nerves, but she nonetheless tried to encourage him to remain alert, communicative, before he faded away altogether.
De Vriend picked up the paper, looked at it, then leafed through it slowly until suddenly he bent forwards and stared.
Shall we read an article together? Are you interested in . . .
De Vriend stood up, walked across the room, back and forth, looking, searching. Madame Joséphine stared at him in
astonishment. What are you looking for?
My notepad. Haven’t you seen? The death notices. I have to cross out a name, yet another name from my list.
Ten
Gdy wszystko było na próżno,
nawet najpiękniejsze wspomnienie nas nie pocieszy.
I jak tu szukać usprawiedliwienia?
ÉMILE BRUNFAUT STOOD naked in the bathroom with his back to the mirror, trying to peer over his shoulder to establish whether there was a bruise or a wound in the area of his coccyx or sacrum. Initially the bath had relaxed him, but the longer he sat in the tub the more intense the pain above his buttocks had become, unquestionably a result of his fall.
His cervical vertebrae clicked and crunched, but he couldn’t turn his head far enough to see the small of his back. Now the pain in his coccyx was joined by muscle tension in his neck. Brunfaut knew, of course, that his body couldn’t be as supple, flexible and elastic as a Russian gymnast’s, but the fact that he was so stiff depressed him. “To avoid getting rusty”, his colleague Jules Meunier had regularly done Yoga exercises in police headquarters. He had even performed the odd headstand during the longer meetings. How ridiculous Brunfaut had found it! But so quirky, on the other hand, that it was almost endearing. Jules had probably been right. Brunfaut was certain that Jules could turn his head and look at his back and coccyx in the mirror without feeling any tension or pain at all. Oh Jules! How elastic and flexible you were when the Atlas case was taken from me and I had to go. You were able to turn your back on me just like that, without any tension or pain!
Brunfaut was trying to massage his neck – it was all very stiff back there – when the telephone rang. He ran from the bathroom to the bedroom where he had undressed, but his mobile wasn’t there. He ran into the sitting room and there it was, on the desk. He picked it up and froze. It was Philippe.
Listen, Brunfaut said, we’re not going to discuss this over the phone. Yes, I do want you to explain. Of course. Let’s meet . . . where? Café Kafka? Where’s that? Rue des Poissonniers? Corner of rue Antoine Dansaert. O.K. In an hour and a half. D’accord.
The Capital Page 28
