by Peter Nadas
Anyone going to the bathhouse had to pass in front of the laundry, but few people were allowed to walk freely on the camp’s roads and footpaths except for Kramer. The terrible bathhouse was an enormous white tiled hall, with more than two hundred showerheads in the ceiling, of which about two dozen were dripping, the sound of the drops echoing loudly. Through the multipaned windows, open on this Sunday afternoon, one could see the famous oak from a slightly higher angle; the woods were lower down and much farther away, vanishing into infinity beyond the electrified barbed-wire fence. The three men sat on a bench inside the bath, warming their backs and shoulders in the sun coming through the window.
He succeeded in convincing them that without the criminals they would not be able to win the battle with the criminals.
They asked him to wait outside while they made their next decision.
While they deliberated long and rescinded their earlier decision, Kramer waited in the wintry-cool shadow of the bathhouse, looking into the distance above the oak, above the woods. Until they called him back in, he shuddered slightly with fear, though he was not afraid of death. He was not afraid that his comrades would kill him. That would be more like a kind of mercy. There was no point in hoping or knowing that in the end his comrades would see reason. He was trembling a little. They can do nothing else, and he cannot do anything else. It was not his fear of death but his dread of life—that is what he feared so much, that they would thrust him out from among themselves, and then his entire life would become senseless retroactively and his death would be senseless too. All his activity until now would lose significance. There would not be an iota of sacrifice in his death.
But now he wanted to say good-bye to him; he was taking leave of his sensible life.
Gregor, he said quietly, and this was exceptional because in the four years when they lived in each other’s soul and physical proximity he had never said the boy’s first name out loud. In the barracks, the name sounded so scandalous that he instantly recalled the plank wall, warmed by spring heat, which even the fragrant cold of the woodland night could not quickly cool, where they, squeezed between two buildings, felt the warmth on their bodies. They were standing in the starless, deathly dangerous darkness with their pants pulled down, helpless and listening intently.
He knew a good place, Peix had whispered ten minutes earlier on his pallet. Kramer thought Peix meant a hiding place for something, like food, that he wanted to share; in a few minutes, he followed the boy. They carefully went around the latrines. Twice they had to wait for the searchlight’s beam to pass and then run quickly, one at a time, and then Peix led him here. Kramer followed the boy with alert attention and also with admiration; Peix had arrived only a few weeks earlier but was moving about as if he had lived at Buchenwald for years. As they stood trembling with emotion in the heat emanating from the two buildings on either side of them, Peix excitedly pushed his pants down and, shuddering with passion, groped after the cord of Kramer’s pants. It was as if they had washed the desire of pleasure into the sensation of danger and it was impossible to say which was greater. Kramer, surprised, rather felt, endured, or heard all this, but they could see nothing of each other in the darkness. Within the darkness was a more warmly outlined darkness, and this second quality of darkness was the other person. Which conquered them both, more than either of them had anticipated or wanted. Peix found Kramer’s hand and led it to himself, and for a while that sealed their fate, since from then on they could both justifiably believe that the other one wanted the same thing. Why would Kramer have resisted a kid in such a situation. From then on, the few significant moments of their lives were made up of hesitant, hasty movements like these, directed at each other, of which they were incapable alone and alone would not even have thought of, hasty, impatient movements that occasionally caused a bit of joy or evoked the memory of joy. These fractions of seconds thrust them close together, much closer than any closeness they might have known before. They were intent on fulfilling the obligation they imagined they owed each other, if that is how the other one liked it; neither of them wanted for himself the small amount of good every man’s body knows of the bodies of other men; they both wanted to give it to the other. But it all turned out badly; out of sheer consideration for the other, it became difficult to restrain their aversion, embarrassment, and urge to laugh, so after a while they stopped, giving up, at a loss. They stood in the hiding place, foreheads touching, hugging each other’s shoulders and waist as strongly and mercifully as possible. They were careful not to let their loins make contact again.
But now Peix was paying no attention to him, as if he actually neither saw nor heard Kramer.
Bulla turned to him, looking at Kramer with his wide, clever brown eyes, the man who had saved his life and who, because of him, must now go. If he didn’t want to go—he obviously had turned obstinate—they’d be there in a few seconds with their dogs and take him away.
Bulla thought Kramer might put up a fight.
Perhaps Kramer would approach them, embrace the little Huguenot, and then leave. Perhaps he would graze the nicely ribbed feminine lips with a kiss. Which would have irritated Peix extremely, as did almost any human contact or feeling.
Now he understood Peix’s intention, but this time he’d come too late.
He did not have time to shout or interfere, because Peix had already grabbed the low-hanging, heavy lamp, pulled it back as if taking aim, and with one staggering blow crushed Bulla’s skull. The skull opened from Bulla’s ears to his forehead, they heard something that might have been the beginning of a whimper, and for a split second the strong lamplight illuminated the soft, gleaming, pink, and motionless brain until, with a short thud, the body collapsed in the light.
Peix let go of the lamp, which, skirting sprays of blood and yanking its beam of light in all directions, swung back into place. While the Hungarian countess’s voice continued to crackle and soar, it kept swaying fitfully.
We can go then, Peix answered the loudspeaker, somewhat later, and in his joy he let out a loud neigh of a laugh. He rarely laughed aloud, but when he did he sounded like a whinnying horse. Kramer particularly liked his infernal laugh; it was as if he were shouting to someone, good job, man, well done. And that’s how it really was, they could go because at that instant the loudspeaker fell silent again.
Obersturmführer Döring, who had just called Kramer to the south gate, now simply said, Peix to the south gate.
Across the vast Appelplatz they could go side by side, heads bent sharply down; they never looked at each other, not for a moment. They looked like two mutually offended people parting in extreme anger though neither of them could have named the reason for it. On the other side they were waiting for them with their dogs; from there, they accompanied them farther but separately. Out the large gate that was always brightly lit by floodlights, both its wings, unusually, open. Along the darkly glittering asphalt road for a while, their wooden shoes clacking between the leather boots. They turned off the road where the floodlights faded almost completely. The sky was slowly brightening. Out here, the loudspeaker could not be heard clearly anymore. All one could tell was that somebody, a woman, kept singing the same thing over and over again. But they could hear the cannons more clearly and they could see, at the bottom of the lightening sky, the reflected lights on the western horizon that preceded the flash and blast of firing. For Kramer, these images made it clear that what they were doing to them was being done in the penultimate moment. The huge cauldrons would not be brought again; there would be no more turnip soup in the camp. That’s why today there had been no morning Appel, which usually lasted for hours. He was a bit amused that he’d managed to glean this bit of fateful information but could not pass it on to his comrades. They will kill the two of them and then, in orderly files, they will lead the entire camp out the wide gates and away from here. The Krankenrevier and the Karanten, together with the sick and the convalescing inside them, they’ll simply burn.
And that is how it happened.
But even Kramer did not imagine that they wanted to drown Peix in front of his eyes.
When Döhring raised his cane under his chin and the other man twisted his arms behind him, a position that, as the result of having been tied down for so many months, immediately caused him terrible nausea and involuntary retching, he understood this too. He could endure this much pain only if he could go on retching. Peix had to undress; no matter how badly they were beating him, the undressing progressed very slowly. His nakedness emerged from the darkness before Kramer’s eyes. He would have preferred to suffer Döhring’s blows to seeing what they were doing to Gregor. In his mind, he was praying for him like a child. By now no man could have held Kramer up. And Döhring could not at the same time prop up Kramer’s chin and hit him. Several men rushed to help him, the dogs were raging on their short leashes, and they beat him—but not so that he would lose consciousness.
He did not look.
No sound passed his throat either; he was retching silently.
That was all he could do; in his mind, though, he was shouting his prayers for Gregor, for him he was ready to address God and even call for His help.
No matter how hard they hit him, how loudly they yelled at him to open his eyes. The pain made him vomit. They had to leave off for a moment. They even let go of him. But he had to open his eyes and he saw what they were doing with Gregor’s body. They had to jump back to avoid his puking on them. Salivating bile, he kept yanking his head in their hands and felt his pain for Gregor as if, along with all his innards, his entire physical essence were turning inside out, pouring through his throat and mouth, and he no longer had air to breathe or a voice with which to speak. He ended on the ground. He barely felt the blows, they pressed his face into his vomit, but more strongly than anything else he felt the frozen ground and the rich wet fragrance of the grass. For a good while he could still see the green, only the green, a thunderous green, nothing else, such a lively, vivid green that he could never before, and particularly in that moment, have possibly seen.
They realized they were torturing a corpse only when Gregor was no longer breathing under water; with one huge heave they lobbed his lifeless body into the river.
VOLUME III
The Breath of Freedom
Anus mundi
You won’t be the first in the history of the world, my pretty one, don’t be so conceited, but I can tell you now that you’ll panic as badly as if you were.
She must stay on top, must not slide back. If she can’t find the notes and be confident, if she keeps sliding back, she can say good-bye to a singing career.
Take my word for it.
Randomly she hit a semitone on Mrs. Szemző’s piano.
Again, the same F sharp.
The living soul of destroyed people and objects made themselves heard in the summer evening, and she followed them willingly with her voice.
After a beat she sang the note and then hit the key again and sang into the sound. She was very sensitive to sounds her own hearing longed for. She had ideas about tonality that she tried to formulate with her own vocal organs. But producing sound always kills hearing; she could not hear herself from the outside when singing. Once again, as if to double-check, she hit the key and paused, but the pause turned into emptiness and she quickly told herself, no, this won’t do, not like this, not this.
I won’t find it, she said to herself, I can’t find it.
She would have had to synchronize different elements.
She was also struggling with an urge to weep because of Ágost.
Yet she couldn’t have said why, since she was happy with him.
I simply blame him.
Why is everyone allowed to humiliate me with what they know, she shouted to herself, torn by doubt, even though she was so happy that nothing could crush the strength swelling in her body at this moment, spreading and working in her cells.
Everything was swelling and expanding.
You, Gyöngyvér, she admonished herself in Margit Huber’s voice, you keep on blaming others for your own weaknesses, and she readily owned up to this recurring error for which her teacher often rebuked her.
Pardon me, my dear, but that is ridiculous.
I do make myself ridiculous with this man, but how can I stay away from him.
Actually, she could not have expressed what she had heard in the night, or what she was looking for, or whether she’d find in her memory what her hearing continually whispered to her from behind her inner speech or offered in place of inner speech—what she desired so ardently that she’d want to sing it.
It’s impossible to sing in general, dear child, you should really understand this and accept it as an axiom.
She’d like to give musical form to her need to weep.
Just because you won’t accept it doesn’t mean it isn’t an axiom. It still remains an axiom that you must give everything a form.
She had no reason to be bitter; she should have been truly happy with this man. She patted her tight little belly several times with her spread fingers to check whether she might have suddenly conceived.
You have to give form even to formlessness, don’t you understand. Why don’t you understand.
You can sing only something and only somehow, Gyöngyvér, and if you don’t find an original form for it, said Margit Huber, raising her voice and pounding wildly on the piano to show this stupid girl what happens to sounds without any original form, chaos, that’s what happens, nothing, nada, and then all your weltschmerz isn’t worth a brass farthing. Your enthusiasm is also worthless, worth nothing, hysteria, zilch, do you understand, dear, nothing, she yelled as she banged frantically on the piano.
But she hadn’t relinquished her ethereal smile, which still managed to enchant Gyöngyvér.
When you take a breath just before a phrase, you should already know what you are going to do with it.
Those two F sharps, for example, slipped away again at the end.
Careful, don’t grasp the sound from below, Gyöngyvér.
Instead of the sought-after forms, Gyöngyvér Mózes found all sorts of things that only made her want to weep more. How can I know why and what I do when I’m singing, or why I can’t do something. For the sake of forming the right sounds, time should be suspended; she was just chasing a little girl’s wishes, empty daydreams. How wonderful it would be to become a famous singer instantly, all her efforts in that direction suddenly and simultaneously to bear fruit, and she, with her grand feelings, appearing on the stage of every great opera house in the world. Little Médi would stare at her with wide eyes, wouldn’t she. She could see herself getting out of the taxi, gathering the collar of her mink coat close about her neck, and not giving a single autograph to anyone.
These grand feelings included the belief that she actually spoke Italian; all that was needed was enlightenment.
No big deal.
Sometimes she tested it; she waited long and patiently for her mind to become enlightened, the mind that used her present feelings to conceal many feelings from her earlier life.
When she concentrated long enough on finding what lurked behind these feelings, she saw clearly that consciousness of things past glimmered through them. It was only from her earlier life that she could summon the idea that she’d once been a man, Italian and castrated, and only infinite modesty and bashfulness kept her from making contact with the genuine knowledge she had accumulated in her former life. All right, she doesn’t know the words in Italian, or doesn’t know their meaning since in her former life she did not know Hungarian, but gradually everything will come to her and then, based on her present Hungarian knowledge, she’ll be able to analyze all the things she’d known before. It’s not a matter of her learning them, because Italian words and Italian grammatical structures are already in her brain. She must find the way to reach them somehow. Whenever she struggled to find her way back to forgotten knowledge, making crude mistakes and discovering silly
technical inadequacies in the process, problems appeared in her consciousness that were the very ones to which Margit Huber continuously called her attention and which nonetheless she could not solve.
You’re always after success, my child.
But it’s impossible to note the many things you asked me to, all at the same time, and to remember them.
Stop sniveling. Feeling sorry for yourself won’t help a bit.
If every single day you warmed up your voice by practicing scales several times, you can be sure you’d find it.
If only she could at last sing freely, instead of this eternal practicing of scales.
Maybe if you didn’t make me stop so often I could sing.
After so much uncontrolled shouting, I can’t be expected to have a voice, she thought, very content with her exhausted and naked body. As if in her great self-satisfaction she were saying, all right, so I’m not talented; no matter how much I may blame Médike I’m a complete antitalent, irresponsible, and the laziest person in the world; and it’s true I don’t practice enough, and anyway I imagine I’m a great natural talent who doesn’t need all this practicing. I’ve got a great body and I don’t lose my musicality even when fucking, nobody can doubt that; and this time this guy really fucked me but good, I think in this great fucking session I finally found my match.