And then to the women’s surprise, but in particular to Libuse’s surprise and Marta’s, the band played a beautiful Czech song.
“It’s a sign,” Libuse whispered. “I’m half-Czech, don’t forget, like the whole Czech Princess Libuse.”
“Quiet,” Marta said.
“My time has come.”
“Don’t talk, please,” Marta whispered. Stern and his entourage approached. Libuse had begun to sway, to mouth the lyrics. “Please, Libuse,” Marta whispered.
And then the two were in front of them. Stern took the card from Libuse’s hand. “Are you enjoying the entertainment we’ve arranged for you?” he asked.
He was looking directly into Libuse’s eyes, Marta could tell, and Libuse turned her head directly toward the voice.
“Yes, sir,” Libuse said. “It’s a song from Rusalka by Dvorak, my favourite opera.”
“What appeals to you, exactly?”
“It’s never easy to explain why music appeals.”
“Still,” he said.
“It’s Rusalka’s call to the moon, we’re hearing.” She’d begun to sway a bit again. “‘Rekni mu, stribrny mesicku, me ze jej objima rame’—‘Oh tell him, silver moon, that my arms enfold him, in the hope that for at least a moment he will dream of me.’ She is the little mermaid, the fairy-tale mermaid in love with a prince,” Libuse said. “She wants to become a creature of the land. The prince doesn’t know, when he goes to swim in the sea, that she envelops him, stirs up the waves to caress him.” Libuse paused, but Stern didn’t respond.
At the conclusion of the aria, the band bounced on immediately to another soldier’s song, “Es war ein Edelweiss,” Herms Niel’s paean to the elite mountain troops, played repeatedly on Heinz Goedecke’s Request Concert radio show, broadcast over Greater German Radio to the armed forces.
Libuse heard nothing but the marching music. She saw a presence still before her, so she took a chance and proceeded. “Rusalka is neither woman nor fairy, neither living nor dead. She wants to be set free from a watery grave. She sees a devastating beauty she can’t attain—more than a prince, more than the land—beauty, a life.”
The officer still didn’t answer and didn’t move. She couldn’t see him. Was she supposed to keep talking until he asked her to stop? Maybe she should talk about other arias, other operas, her feelings about music. She said, weakly now, calmly, “It seems to be a story about the earth and the sea, but really it’s a story about desire. In the song, Dvorak is really bringing us news from heaven, if you listen.”
“I see.”
“But that’s not why I love the music.”
“It’s not?”
“No, I love the music because I want the same thing Rusalka wants. I long for beauty. The song is beautiful, and you’ve asked me to explain beauty, to rationalize my love. It’s not easy. It’s much easier to rationalize hatred.”
Stern waited another moment as if to see if Libuse was finished. Libuse kept her head aimed at the place his voice had been. “705, to the right,” he said, finally, and placed Libuse’s card in the hand of his assistant.
Libuse was just then overcome. She sobbed, tried to hold it back, but sobbed again. She didn’t know how to stop herself. Stern was still half in front of her. He waited. Libuse clutched herself around the ribs and breasts, shuddering with the fall wind and with the final triumphant notes of “Es war ein Edelweiss.”
Stern stood before Marta now, but waited for Libuse to finish before he continued. He was grinding his teeth, his jaw rippling as he gazed at Marta, held her card, glanced down at it and up again. Finally, though Libuse had not finished gasping and hiccuping, Stern said, “818, right.”
He moved on immediately. There was a woman standing next to Marta whom Marta had never seen. She didn’t know what nationality the woman was and couldn’t even tell her age, and yet it was plain she’d been in Auschwitz a long time. The ravages showed in her body and face. When they’d first assembled in the line, Marta had wanted to acknowledge the woman with her eyes, touch the woman with her health, but she’d seemed out of reach, untouchable. She was a woman utterly deprived of the means to express herself, not with a jaunty dress, not with the copper ringlets of hair quickly sprouting from her scalp, not with an extra handle around the midriff to say she enjoyed her cakes, not with so much as an expression on her face—not a smile, not a scowl, not fear. She was a woman in whom even the pilot light had gone out.
Romeo Stern took this woman’s card, noted her number, “344,” and added, “right.”
He hustled down the line now. A spate of lefts was followed by a long succession of rights. It seemed almost indiscriminate, rushed. Then the small group in charge marched to the front where they’d begun.
Stern was matter-of-fact when he turned and spoke. “Those of you on the left, return to the lager and retrieve your clothing. Those of you on the right, you won’t be needing anything for the time being. Please stay in the yard until the others have left.”
The words clung to Marta, constricted her throat. As the chosen women filed back into the lager, Libuse leaned toward Marta and said, “I’m sorry. I lost my grip on things. I—”
“Do you ever shut up?” Marta asked. “I mean ever?”
Oh, dear Lord, my dear God, thought Marta, as the reality of her situation circulated through her body. What had happened here? To stand before an accuser in a court of law after taking the life of a child or an innocent bank clerk or a political leader—to butcher a sworn enemy at an inappropriate time and in an inappropriate place—was one thing. At least you could fathom why you’d been sentenced to death. Even if it didn’t thrill you to be so sentenced, something in you, a sense of balance, would have been satisfied. Even here, even in Auschwitz, to stand before a firing squad with an idiot orchestra playing after organizing an insurgency and strangling a guard, or even not strangling a guard, in some demented and satanic understanding of the universe satisfied a sense of justice. But to have been a dental assistant in Szeged who wanted nothing more than to make visitors comfortable, relieve every patient’s toothache, to have attended mass and confession more often than Jesus or Mary had any right to expect, to have sought extra cabbage for her man and her cat, to have grieved her parents’ passing and written loving letters to her one brother in Chicago, to have confidently played Juliet in her Gymnazium opposite another Romeo, a sweet but fumbling one with blond curls coiling from his musketeer hat—where in this vitae did a visit to the gallows satisfy the laws of humanity or nature?
Libuse turned to Marta and clasped her fleshy body against her own bony one. Libuse’s nipples were hard and cold as sea pebbles. The two cried together briefly until the kapo, Manci, told them to break it up.
“Why?” snapped Libuse, pulling away from Marta and turning toward Manci, her nearly sightless eyes reaching through the fog. “Are you going to shoot us if we don’t?”
Manci didn’t answer but waited for the women to finish. When they did, she said softly, “You can walk together. Stay together as you walk.”
The women of the right took their walk of a quarter of an hour toward the gas chambers. Marta glanced behind her at the inmate who’d been beyond reach. Her eyes had no function other than to find the way. A twinge of envy shot through Marta. How much better to have been this woman now, in these last steps of the journey.
As the inmates approached, they heard many more voices. “New recruits,” Marta told Libuse. “Hundreds of them, several hundred. There are children and—”
“Please,” Libuse said, “I can hear them.”
A boy was speaking in Yiddish about Transylvania, but he stopped as the women of the lager came near. “Why doesn’t he say more?” Libuse asked.
“He’s staring right at us,” Marta said.
“We must look like subterranean creatures,” Libuse said. “I don’t blame him.”
Libuse said in Yiddish to the boy, pointing her voice where she believed he was standing, “Where in Transylvania ar
e you from, what part?”
The boy said, “Not the part where the mountains are lying down and are smooth, but where they’re standing up.”
“Oh,” Libuse said. She was smiling.
“We came on a stinky train,” he said. “Now we’re having a shower.”
The smile withered from Libuse’s face. “Of all the planets in the solar system,” she whispered to Marta, “I think this one’s my least favourite.”
“Are you blind?” the boy asked.
“No,” Libuse said. “Are you?”
The boy thought this was the funniest remark he’d ever heard and erupted in wild laughter. Libuse laughed with him.
The new arrivals, many of them women and children and grandparents, most from Hungary this time, saw Marta to be rosy and alive—scared, yes, and baffled, but spirited, animated. A woman stepped toward Marta and Libuse. She was wearing a grey cloche hat with an absurd violet ribbon tied around it, and her white hair puffed out from under the brim, light as cirrus clouds. Otherwise, she was naked. Everyone else was naked and shaved as always, the hair sent off for mattress stuffing and other products. The guards had overlooked her. They’d forgotten the part about the hair and the hat. Marta rejoiced at the mistake. She whispered the news to Libuse.
Libuse said, “Maybe by accident they’ll scatter our ashes in Canada and we’ll be shipped off with the gold fillings and earrings to Switzerland and be turned into gold bars.”
“Who knows?” Marta said.
“And you are a red triangle,” she said to Marta, “a political prisoner—not a Star of David. What are you even doing here among us?”
Marta took the blind woman’s hand in hers and clutched it, feeling the thin bones shifting.
A woman nearby, one of the new recruits, said, “What’s going on here? It’s cold.” She rubbed her upper arms and shoulders. “This is ridiculous.”
“Don’t worry,” Marta said. “It won’t help to fret.”
Another woman, a younger one with small pancake breasts and wide hips, watched with wild eyes that darted from person to person. She was with a young man with a long, thin penis jutting straight out from his loins. How odd, Marta thought. Had it been impelled by lust or by a bursting bladder? Would it outstand him? Would he die before he could satisfy whatever urge made it rise from its seat, the man’s heartbeat frozen in the standing column? What thoughts possessed her. The man saw Marta staring and concealed his genitals with his hands. He was looking at her, too, her breasts and her black triangle below. Marta didn’t hide from his eyes, so he turned away altogether.
The women from the lager were herded to one side of the gas chamber, and the new arrivals were ahead of them, so Marta and Libuse were at the very end of a long line. The kapo came by and said something to them in Ladino. He was a Greek Jew and tried some German now. He spoke harshly, pressing people into line, shoving one or two. A man asked him a question about the proceedings, and the kapo slapped him roundly across the face, then hustled up the line, waiting to be challenged again.
To make sure the inmates had understood the kapo, a German guard, an SS, now walked down the line of naked people. Marta warned Libuse that he was coming. As the soldier moved along, he jabbed people in the ribs with the butt of his rifle, reminding them what order meant, saying in German they were to enter the showers quietly and co-operatively so that they could all get on with their day.
“Who is this one?” Libuse whispered, her head down. “Is this Cerberus—Kerberos for our Greek friend? Is this the monster dog with three heads and a tail made of writhing snakes?”
“He’s coming,” whispered Marta.
The guard paused deliberately at someone ahead of Marta and Libuse so that Libuse could hear him approach. “What’s with Hell Hound?” Libuse whispered. “Maybe at an early age he was dropped on his heads.”
Libuse took a rifle butt to the ribs that made her cough. “Where is Hercules when you need him most?” she sputtered out. And the goon struck her again.
He waited for her to stop coughing and straighten up. She was nursing the place at her side where he’d struck her. She started to say something more, but Marta grabbed one of Libuse’s hands and squeezed hard, begging her to stop. At first Marta was sure the goon was going to strike her now, but he was gazing at her instead, not fiercely, as he had been a moment before. Marta didn’t back down now. She stared back into his dark eyes, eyes the colour of her own. His hair was as black as hers, when she had some. He seemed disarmed for just a moment. A young girl up ahead called out to someone, and the goon hustled back up the line and clubbed the child with his weapon, and clubbed her again, so that she fell unconscious to the ground. When her mother tried to lift her, the goon bashed her head, too, and added her to the heap.
In a flash, the kapo was there to help clean up the mess. He made a couple of male inmates lift the woman and girl and carry them to the front. The door of the great chamber opened then, and they deposited the two inside against the far wall.
Libuse’s stomach growled audibly. She was still clutching her side. “We haven’t had breakfast yet,” she said. “I guess they didn’t want to waste any gruel on us.”
The clang of the gas chamber door sent a shudder through Marta’s naked form. The end of her life was as far away as that door. She had planned to have children. She’d wanted a boy—or either—a child with Istvan. It would have been a good marriage, if he’d agreed to have her. The subject had never come up. In all that time, it never came up. Where would the ceremony be held—in the dark cellar under the floorboards? It would have been a comfortable life with Istvan and their son or daughter. What a twist. She’d had so little time to ascertain what they were doing here, on Libuse’s least favourite planet, and no time now.
“I could have got us some sleeping pills,” she said to Libuse, “from the infirmary. It would have been much easier—we’d doze, fall asleep, and then…”
Libuse gripped Marta’s hand ever more tightly. For once, the tall woman was speechless. She was trembling. As they heard the barks of the kapo and the goon and began to move, Libuse said, “Whole cities will go down with us today—do you know that?—whole civilizations.”
Marta looked all around her at her companions, the woman up ahead with the cirrus hair and cloche hat, the Transylvanian boy, the woman with vacant eyes from the line in the yard—344, she thought it was. She wondered what it would be like to stand in line with hundreds of people who shared her birthday, June 16, the way she now stood in line with hundreds who’d share the day of her death—what was it today?—October something—she’d lost track. “What’s the date?” she asked Libuse.
“What does it matter?”
“Because I want to know. I’m just thinking. I need to know.”
Marta put the question to the people ahead. She put it in German and tried halting French, but no one said a thing. They were all shuffling forward. She thought she might arouse the wrath of the kapo or the goon. She called out the question more forcefully, frantically, until someone turned from way up ahead, near the young man with the erection, and said, “November 7.”
November 7. She felt calm all of a sudden. November 7. 16 June 1917–7 November 1944.
She imagined the graveyard with her companions:
12 May 1931–7 November 1944
15 March 1912–7 November 1944
6 December 1880–7 November 1944
11 November 1939–7 November 1944
23 September 1907–7 November 1944
How quaint—but of course there would be no graveyard. Or, if there were a graveyard here, her stone would read: 181818—16/6/17–7/11/44.
What a lot of handsome numbers. And if you wanted a blessing from the Lord on the stone, what number would He be? One, surely. And His number would have to be spelled out: One. Ein.
Half the line had been swallowed. Hundreds were inside already. For a moment, Marta was able to see what lay beyond the chamber and above the smoke, a certain peace, like good
music, as Libuse had described it, the “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem, the “Marcia funebre” from Beethoven’s Eroica, the symphony that always loomed there, whether played or not played, remembered or imagined—it presided over all other music—its perfection waiting to make companions out of us, waiting to make us whole—the poetry of Romeo and Juliet waiting, too, and Homer and the Ancient Mariner—and—no—music above all else, at the fore, kind Mozart, solid Beethoven—his music so impossibly beautiful he himself must have been influenced by it, fallen into the groove of his own good work so that he had to pull himself out, dream of something new each day—and steady Bach, discovering beauty in his mathematics—their angelic German souls gazing down on this chamber and this yard and these shorn heads.
They were near the door, now, and Marta’s heart quickened. “We’re going to this place together, Libuse,” she said, “and I don’t know you. I don’t even know what you do. I know one of your parents was from Brno. I know you’re tall.”
“I play piano—I played piano. I gave lessons, and I played in the Prague State Opera Orchestra, and then the orchestra in Miskolc,” she said. “And where do you plan to take this knowledge now?”
“Where? I—”
“And I have a husband and a young son. We came together on this journey.”
Libuse and Marta were the last two naked inmates herded through the gas chamber door. A boy inside, a boy from Thessaloniki, possibly, or even north of it, Kastoria maybe, said his feet were cold—that much Libuse could make out from her passing knowledge of Macedonian, and she passed it on to Marta. His mother said they would warm up soon in the shower.
Marta turned Libuse toward the open door and hoped for sympathy. What else could she do? The two women had one tiny advantage: they were nearest the door and their executioners.
Once again, she caught the goon’s gaze, his features much like hers, his black hair, his dark eyes—he would have passed more easily as a Jew than an Aryan, as would she—as did she. But he wore the uniform, and his eyes were glassy. They must have seen too much, Marta sensed in that moment, and she was just one of the huddled, herded masses he had to jab along into the showers every single day—and this was his life—he on one side of a fence and she on the other, just a few steps away. She knew that then, and he might have known it, too. That was the kind of world she’d stepped into. She was grasping Libuse’s hands too tightly and glanced down for just a second to see the whites of their knuckles. Then Marta looked squarely up into the glass eyes of the goon—they might as well have been glass—they had no life, no spark, no gleam of recognition, just the gleam of glass—and she stared at him, just to penetrate his face, warm the glass. Marta wanted him to remember one single face out of the hordes—it might as well have been hers—why not hers?
Gratitude Page 31