Eichmann's Executioner

by Astrid Dehe

  Zeklikovsky puts his hat back on, walks around the oven, lays his hand on the curved surfaces, runs his fingers over the ridges that he has smoothed, strokes the door, the lever. Opens the door, peers into the darkness, this night before the rising flames. Soon. Soon he will lie here. A chain: Zeklikovsky touches the oven that will touch the body of the man who sent Zeklikovsky’s family to their deaths. He can forge this chain even more closely, can feel the incinerator not just with his hand but also with his arms, legs, body, he can lie inside it, just as the dead body will lie inside it. Zeklikovsky holds on to the door, pushes first his right leg into the chamber, then the left, forces his broad, muscular body in afterward.

  The opening is narrow, too narrow for him. He cannot fit inside fully, cannot get out, either, breathes all the air out of his lungs, pulls his stomach in, looks for something to hold on to—that could work, surely that would enable him to get free—it does not work. Zeklikovsky is trapped. He has no choice but to wait.

  An hour later he hears a big truck pull up outside the factory. The driver doors are opened, closed again, footsteps crunch over the gravel in the yard, men enter the hall, one walks over to the oven. Zeklikovsky painfully turns his head to one side, sees the prison director, whose eyes fill with blatant disapproval when he realizes what has happened. He waves his men over, four soldiers, who pull the oven builder out of the incinerator. The director turns around, gives a few short instructions, and leaves the hall.

  Zeklikovsky understands. This oven should be pure, untouched. It may be used only once, be fired only once. This oven is meant for one man, whose death is to leave no traces, as though a shadow were disappearing. For him they have erected a set of gallows in the prison, which will be taken down again once his body has been removed from the rope. For him they have created a hole in the floor of the execution room, which will be filled in again as soon as he has fallen through it. For him they have ordered a new oven, which will never again be used once he has been cremated. And no one else will ever sit inside the glass box that was made for him. Perhaps, thinks Zeklikovsky, they will even destroy the cell in which he sat, will break down the walls, build new ones.

  The driver has now maneuvered the truck into the hall, the soldiers have laid thick harnesses over the oven, a crane will lift it onto the loading platform. Zeklikovsky stands next to the driver, who watches the proceedings with a critical eye. Where will you take it? he asks. The driver shrugs his shoulders. No instructions yet.

  Somewhere, an Oven

  The body of the condemned man will be transported. The transport destination will be Zeklikovsky’s oven.

  The oven will be transported, too; secured with chains and covered in a gray tarpaulin, it sits on the loading platform of the truck that has just left the factory and will soon cross the boundary of Petah Tikva.

  The driver, a level-headed man called Epstein, has not yet been told his destination.

  He heads southward toward Ramla, where the prison is, where the final preparations are under way, where the body of the condemned man will hang, where they will take him down from the rope. The truck moves as if it has no driver. Is it the oven that is setting the course, is it searching impatiently for its purpose, for the body that is to come? Epstein, who accelerates, brakes, changes gear, is just the means.

  The sun is already setting. The trees lining the road have sprouted tall shadows, which lie across the road like railway sleepers. When the truck rolls over the sleepers, the shadows slide over the hood and for a moment darken the windshield, the driver’s cab, the hidden cargo. They even touch the face of the prison director, who sits next to Epstein with his eyes closed. Just a few kilometers from the prison the vehicle slows down. There are posts on either side of the prison entrance, heavily guarded, on the highest alert. None of the soldiers stops the truck, the men nod, simply salute and wave them through, point them toward the main entrance, where the heavy gate is opened. Searchlights are directed at the yard on four sides; where the beams that guide them through the dusk intersect, the truck comes to a halt.

  It almost glows in the blazing light, the edges of the oven can be seen underneath the tarpaulin. As though the prison has finally received its core, a heart that is already beating but is not yet pumping anything though the iron veins.

  The condemned man’s cell has no windows; he cannot see the truck. Perhaps he raised his head as the engine sound grew louder, looked up from the page he is currently writing, listened and understood. If it is so, his last will pounds within him, written out three times in the same words. The three pages lie in the prison director’s safe; the third, valid, sits on top. Whoever opens the safe now will be hit with the full force of his sentences: I wish my body to be taken by my brothers out of this country and returned to my homeland.

  There, it is to be burned.

  There, in that place, on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea, the Alps, in the former Reich, in a town in which the condemned man was not born, but which he calls home. There. Not here.

  The director has left the truck and gone into the main prison building. No one comes, there is no one in sight, just the truck in the yard and the oven. Epstein rolls down the window. Is the oven murmuring, tugging at its chains? Probably just the wind trapped under the tarpaulin.

  The prison director comes back, climbs onto the passenger seat, exchanges a few words with the driver. Epstein nods, turns the engine back on, takes his foot off the brake, accelerates. The wheels spin, the truck is unable to move a meter.

  The oven puts up a fight. It gains weight. It weighs as heavily as the sentence to be carried out. The proximity to the condemned man reflects images in the darkness of its chamber, wakes it from its iron stiffness. Chains clatter to the ground, tarpaulins fold away to the side, a crane grasps it from above. The oven glows under the searchlights, it is lifted up, swung to one side, set down alongside the truck, it almost feels the gravel and the chips of asphalt underneath. But the last stretch is insurmountable. The ground puts up a fight. Like arrow splinters in a magnetic field the flints and chippings line up and reject the oven. The oven insists on its gravity, on its determination: It should stay here, the court sentence should be carried out here! A struggle begins, a battle between two forces, real enough but not to be contained by the laws of physics. The oven as a representative of the sentence, against the ground as an advocate of the words in the safe. In-this-yard against in-my-hometown. Epstein releases the clutch, the tires grip at last, the engine roars, chucks out black clouds from the exhaust pipe, the truck passes the gate, circles the site, stops again. There are searchlights here, too, but no gravel, instead there is roughly cut concrete, more suitable perhaps. Fine, the oven wants to stay here. The other will does not allow it.

  I wish my body to be taken by my brothers out of this country and returned to my homeland.

  There, it is to be burned.

  The vehicle starts to move once more, stops again, moves again, stops, starts once again, and then once again comes to a halt. The oven sees stone slabs come together and move apart again, a seemingly forgotten tool sitting on top. Small, light cones on the sandy ground, terebinth and cypress trees have scattered their fruits; they remain there, the ground rejects the oven. Next, the fragrances, green and gold they blow against it, intoxicating, full of promise, and yet no place for ovens, for this oven. It is driven in a wide arc, northward, eastward. From this country to my home country. The oven braces itself against it, all for nothing. There, my body is to be burned.

  The air tastes of salt and the coolness of the night as the truck stops for the seventh, for the final time. There are wooden planks beneath the oven, it touches them carefully, lowers itself down, rises and falls with them like the rhythm of the waves.

  Each of the seven places has the oven in its own way—they keep it, are awarded it. The body of the hanged man was cremated in the prison yard, says one source. In a building on the edge of the prison grounds, says another. In an abandoned factory in Ram
la. In a warehouse in Ramla. In a small patch of forest outside the city. The oven was in an orange grove near the coast, say others. A journalist, chosen as a witness for the execution, writes that the cremation took place onboard a police boat. Where the boat was heading, he did not say.

  The oven can be seen in each of these places, on every piece of ground, seven times over. My ashes are to be divided into seven parts.

  Seven parts, seven places, one oven that sits in each place, the burning of a will against the force of a sentence—constellations, how we imagine ourselves to be when we have the freedom to do so, when something happens that cannot be seen in its entirety. Beginning and end are marked, assigned a unique index—everything else, the details, remains open, an empty field, in which people can plow furrows of fate and resign themselves to things as they do in fairy tales.

  This is not how it was. So how was it?

  Perhaps there were not any transports at all, perhaps no Epstein driving the truck. Perhaps even the oven is just an image, an expression of desire, the circle of perpetrators and victims can close itself. In any case, Haaretz, the daily newspaper, whose straightforward, reliable reporting is respected, knows nothing of the oven that was transported. Instead, it mentions a cement factory where the incinerator runs both day and night. The decision was made to cremate the condemned man there. No one is allowed to give the name of the factory. But its night lighting is clearly visible from the prison.

  In Petah Tikva—gateway to hope—a man is welding together iron and steel. Pinchas Zeklikovsky is building an oven for a company in Eilat on the Red Sea that incinerates fish bones. He imagines he is building the oven in which the condemned man will be burned.

  Every part of the carcass is used. The meat is filleted, fried, boiled, steamed, eaten, and the rest is processed: The skins are used for fish leather, and the bones, the fish bones, are ground to meal like other bones or simply burned to ashes. Fish bone ash, which is used for something or other. I wonder what.

  The question runs through my mind, although any answer would do. It was just that I didn’t want to let Zeklikovsky go, the oven builder who had been central to the story for a moment would now disappear. My writing couldn’t hold him any longer—my writing had to return to Ramla, to the prison. Back to the cell, back to Eichmann.

  I pulled the piece of paper out of the typewriter and picked up a new one. As I was feeding it in, I heard a bang on the door of my apartment, a real thud. I wheeled over to the door, listened, thought I could hear murmuring; muffled, hushed sentences that soon turned into a hum. Nagar was holding his kippah when I opened the door, wiping sweat off his forehead and temples with a large handkerchief. He put the handkerchief back in his pocket, picked up the bag on the floor beside him. I’ve brought you some lamb, Moshe.

  Now he’s standing at my desk, he won’t sit down. I wanted to ask you, Moshe, I want to ask you.

  He repeats his words, he hums and sings them. I want to ask you, Moshe, I want to ask you. That’s why he’s risked coming to see me; to get an answer. He still wants to ask me something, but the question must have got lost on the way, maybe it was drowned out by his feeling of unease, or perhaps the effort it took him to get here left no room for anything else. He takes out the handkerchief again, removes his kippah, wipes over his head and the back of his neck. What, Shalom? What do you want to ask me? He puts the kippah back on his head and tucks his handkerchief away again. His eyes, which have been dancing about until now, find a focus. He looks at the pages I’ve written, the sheet sticking out of the typewriter. He looks at me.

  I want to ask you . . . Moshe, I want to ask: Where are you writing me to?

  Why isn’t Ben here? He would interrupt. What do you mean, Shalom? Nagar would have to explain, make it clear what he meant. I can’t take on Ben’s role, I am supposed to provide answers, my hesitation is a disappointment in itself. But what should I say? His question surprises and upsets me. This is what he’s thinking about? Shalom Nagar, the narration machine, immune to any other story, wrapped up in his Eichmann like he’s in a cocoon? And now here he is, quivering with unease, feeling sensitive about the papers on my desk, sensitive to my voice, my Eichmann, concerned about my Nagar. No, he’s worried about himself. He can’t differentiate between the Nagar in my text and himself standing there.

  Although he only knows the beginning and two or three fragments, Nagar can feel himself in my writing. Where are you writing me to?

  I’m writing about you and Eichmann, Shalom, I answer quietly, but I’m following Eichmann’s path, not yours. From the day before the judgment to the end. Nagar—my Nagar—follows Eichmann on his journey.

  Nagar nods, but I don’t know if he’s been listening. His gaze has drifted away; he can’t stop looking at the papers on my desk. He points at them. Where are we?

  May 31, 1962, Shalom. The president has denied Eichmann’s appeal. Preparations are under way. I’ve just written about the oven being transported.

  Zeklikovsky built it, Moshe. In Petah Tikva.

  Yes, I say. The reporter from Haaretz can write what he likes. I’d rather have Zeklikovsky’s oven than a furnace in some cement factory, too.

  It was my day off, you know.

  I know, Shalom. The beginning of the chapter was already finished in my head, and even had a title:

  The End of a Day Off

  May 31, 1962, is Nagar’s day off. He has slept in, cleaned his tools, patched up the wire mesh of the chicken coop. Now he goes for a walk with Ora and their little boy. They live in a cramped development with terraced houses, white cubes beneath bright red, gently inclined roofs, barely a distinguishing feature among them. The main street is wide, the rest are all alleyways squeezed between the buildings. The only bit of space is behind the houses, room for a small garden, a shed, a few doves or chickens. It is enough for Nagar, but Ora wants to get out of town, as she calls it, although they barely leave the development and walk toward the hills, along a winding path lined with power masts. The path is dusty, full of stones, here and there a low, dry bush. Ora is holding the little boy’s hand, Nagar is walking alongside them, arms folded across his chest, head bowed, deep in thought. He could not say what he is thinking about. Nothing is weighing on his mind, he has no problems to try to solve, no plans. It is more a kind of waiting, like his mind is on pause but his body will not follow.

  Suddenly Ora stopped, Moshe. She picked up our little boy and turned around. A car was coming up behind us, driving so fast all we could see was a cloud of dust. We moved out of the way to let the car pass. But when it reached us the driver stopped, the back door flew open, someone grabbed me, pulled me inside, slammed the door shut, the driver put his foot down. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ora’s face, her mouth wide open, that’s how shocked she was. I was confused, too, but then I recognized the driver, it was one of my colleagues. And the man who pulled me into the car was Merhavi, my commander. Neither of them said a word. There was no need. I knew what this was about.

  Nagar tells his story in a different way from usual, sounding flat, somehow distanced from the story. His stories at the meeting place always brim with life even after the third telling, but he just rattles this off as if it’s a chore. He’s missing his familiar surroundings, missing Ben who always jumps in, asking for explanations, who’d ask about Ora now. Didn’t Ora call the police? She must have thought you’d been kidnapped, Shalom! And Nagar could elaborate then, explain, make up another version; he might say that the car had stopped and turned back so he could reassure Ora. A colleague is ill, I told her, they’re a man short for the night shift. She wasn’t allowed to know about Eichmann, Merhavi had forbidden us to talk about him.

  Ben’s not here, but that’s not all. Something is bothering Nagar. Not the question he came to ask. Something else, something he can’t or won’t say at the meeting place, something that’s hard for him to admit and that he needs to tell me on my own. So I wait. Nagar looks around the room, digs his hands into his trouser pocke
ts, takes them out again, shuffles together the papers lying all over my desk, stacks them in a nice neat pile.

  You know, Moshe—I tell you stories, you and Ben. You come, I tell them to you. I always say they are true stories, about events that really happened.

  They did happen, Shalom. On May 31, 1962, you had the day off. They picked you up—

  The path Ora and I walk along is too narrow, Moshe. Barely two feet wide with stones everywhere. You couldn’t drive a car down it. How would they have found me in the foothills anyway . . . I’m describing Eichmann’s kidnapping, Moshe. It was him they pulled into a car a few meters away from his wife. It was their wedding anniversary, you know. He’d bought flowers for her, that’s why he came home on a later bus. The Mossad agents had been watching him for weeks; he always took the same bus, got out, smoothed down his coat, let the bus drive off before crossing the road to his house. But on the evening they planned to kidnap him the bus came, the doors opened, the doors closed again, the bus drove away. No Eichmann. They thought: He knows everything. He must have seen us, he’s got away. They were frantic. Why had they waited so long! They sat there in their cars, discussing the situation, wondering what to do. Then the next bus came. The doors open, Eichmann gets out holding his briefcase in one hand and a bunch of flowers in the other. They realize they’ve got him. That’s how it was, Moshe. He often tells me that story. He doesn’t blame the Mossad agents. They did a good job, he says. He knows all about it; after all, he used to work for the secret service. They were called the secret police, the Gestapo.

  Nagar fiddles with my typewriter while he talks, takes out the crooked sheet of paper and puts it back in properly.

  He tells me so often, Moshe. He tells me, I tell you. Sometimes I don’t know who’s talking—sometimes Eichmann is Nagar, and Nagar is Eichmann. It shouldn’t be like that. You have to write, Moshe. You have to write it the way it was.