by Shlomo Kalo
All the former prisoners heard my fiery and incisive peroration and in spontaneous response they let out a whoop of joy and cried:
"May the noble Baron live for ever, Leutenlieb of the House of Munchausen, deliverer of mankind from the madness of the Biter, giving back to humanity its self-respect and sublime image!"
I joined the chorus of voices, with a shouted declaration of my own:
"All honor and praise and respect to you, my brothers in destiny, who have grasped the truth with lightning speed and taken your stand beside it. You are worthy of freedom – you have earned it! And now, without wasting even one precious moment – to work and to business!"
"To work and to business!" my thousands of hearers repeated after me and the reverberation of their cries shook all the buildings and possibly, here and there, caused some structural damage, which my eyes at that moment were incapable of taking in, being veiled by tears of joy and pure excitement, and of profound faith in man and in his creator. Later it became clear to me that the buildings which fell into ruins under the impact of the enthusiastic chorus were ramshackle huts, riddled with rot and on the point of collapse, no longer fit for habitation. And so from strength came sweetness – as in Samson’s day – and those huts were abandoned, and their erstwhile residents moved into the quarters vacated by the "savage beasts" cadre. And immediately an action-committee was formed, to debate the issues and promulgate beneficial directives.
The savage beast personnel were made to work in the glass-factory, on the basis of the same quotas and conditions that they had previously imposed on their prisoners. Those among them who failed to meet the quotas were required to put in extra hours at night, with some of the former prisoners accompanying them to serve as living examples. Until the moment came when, by dint of the abundant blessings inherent in their labors, their minds began to accept the truth about the savage beast which had consumed the last remnant of human decency in their hearts, leaving nothing behind other than the lunacy of the Biter.
Those among us who were skilled in the arts of broadcasting activated the transmitters and sent out communiqués to all the world, announcing that the Savage Beast concentration camp no longer existed as such and the territory had been placed under the jurisdiction of the Allies whose soldiers, so it was understood, were very close to us.
These announcements, to our unpleasant surprise and our deep sorrow, did not hasten our liberation, but on the contrary delayed it a little – or rather, more than a little.
The allied troops who picked up these broadcasts were busy mopping up the debris of the lethal madness which would in time be known, in succinct style, as the Second World War, and their commanders were in no hurry to detach any of their fighting units and send them to see what was going on in the camp and verify the reports that were being received, reports repeatedly aired on all the wave-bands within the range of the camp’s primitive transmitter.
So we had to organize ourselves with our own resources and arrange things so that we would not come to grief on the very threshold of final liberation. The stocks of food that we found in the Savage-Wehrmacht stores were reckoned lavish – in relation to the former "nucleus". In terms of the number of liberated prisoners – there were provisions for only 3.5 days. Two more days – and the remnants set aside for former prisoners had also disappeared into our shriveled stomachs. Then all that remained were the paving-stones of the camp, the rotten wood of its shacks and many tons of glass… glass whichever way you turned.
I was left with no option but to teach people to eat glass before they were overtaken by the scourge of hunger.
So, I laid on a crash-course: I taught the incantation which fortifies the digestive system against the damage caused by glass and conditions it to accept a different style of digestion, and all the former prisoners, including those who until a week before had been their jailers – flocked to the glass-works and filled their mess-tins, consuming the contents in the course of a gala evening laid on specially to celebrate the joyous event and dedicated to it. I pronounced an improvised benediction: "Blessed be the One who has given us life and assured us of our survival through the eating of glass made from sand," and we ate and were happy and satisfied. And only a few of the overseers, in whom the nature of the savage beast had muddled their perceptions and their behavior, injured their butchers’ hands and needed bandaging. This aside, everything proceeded in a spirit of satisfaction and brotherhood, and all the portions served were consumed in full.
Eating glass also contributed to a certain improvement in the quality of life – latrines became redundant: defecation, a process no longer involving any unpleasant smells, took place in the extensive sandpits of the factory, giving back the precise quantity of sand invested in the glass consumed. The energy of the sun stored in the sand before it was eaten as glass, was returned to it in the most unmediated way possible: the open pits drew down from the sun all the types of energy in its rays – light, heat, grace and love – and implanted them afresh in the excreted sand. These energies were well absorbed by the bodies of the glass-eaters and they looked healthy, alert and fresh – although the all too predictable change overtook them, as I have already described to you in the context of one of my previous adventures – their bodies started slowly but surely losing their natural opacity, clearing and turning transparent. Within the first month it was virtually impossible to see anyone who was not as transparent as a store-front window in the center of London or New York or Paris. And every feeling, thought, casual notion or florid fantasy, arising in the mind or the heart or the guts – was immediately visible to the eyes of all. In the types blessed with a rich imagination, it was possible to see impressive spectacles, as fascinating as films, in fact – much more authentic than anything projected on to a screen. As a result of this, those with developed imaginations served as active entertainment facilities and in the evenings, after a lavish meal of glass, at the end of the day’s work in the factory, we used to sit down facing them and watch with great pleasure all the scenes which their rich inventiveness mounted for us. And there were other types with only one thought stuck in their minds, and this took on the form of an antique pendulum, swinging sometimes to the right and sometimes to the left and back again, without variation, and thus occupying the entire space of the brain for itself alone. Sometimes its rhythm changed, unlike that pendulum, and then it resembled a tennis-ball flying from court to court, between players hidden from view.
And then it emerged that all the predators of the Wehrmacht were indeed different, and unfavorably so, from the community of former prisoners among whom there were representatives of all peoples and races, including the lone representative of the island of Forgottenforever, which to this day is not marked on any official maps.
Through the transparent glass of the bodies of former overseers, dark currents crawled like heavy and stifling mists, instead of thoughts, feelings, imagination or ideas. In the case of the satanic major, whose striped prisoner garb suited him admirably – these currents took on the shape of snakes, venomous cobras which from time to time would bite one another, inflicting temporary paralysis before returning to their sinuous writhing. Some of the former prisoners, who turned out to be eminent naturalists, denied themselves the fascinating spectacles provided by the richly imaginative, preferring to observe the satanic major and his cobras, for the purposes of future research in the field of ophidian studies. One of them even claimed that insight into the dark recesses of the major’s soul, clearly visible to all by dint of the excessive consumption of glass, gave him an ingenious idea (it was possible to observe the progress of this idea, taking the form of a red flame rising and subsiding, waxing and waning, intensifying and slackening, according to the degree of concentration invested in it by the scientist) for a long-term research program examining the material difference between natural cobras, crawling on their bellies, and human-style cobras, walking upright and imperceptible to the untrained eye of average people, except by virtue of
the vitreous diet.
At the end of the Glass Age, our camp was invaded by a Russian battalion, which had received updated maps direct from Moscow and had consequently become hopelessly lost. The first action of the Russian soldiers was to climb up and fly their flags and standards from all the watchtowers which had been converted meanwhile into recreational balconies.
One way or the other, in some of the former overseers, members of the predatory Wermacht which had given up the ghost – a spectacular change for the better had taken place, and the black currents in their systems began to clear, raising in our hearts the hope of a better future for the human race, the most abject of all species belonging to the order of carnivores. But those undergoing these changes and raising such prodigious hopes were very few in number. And this goes to show, like a thousand reliable witnesses, how strong and pervasive is the influence of one biter, whose nature is the nature of the cobra in its most insane and venomous manifestation, over the members of his kind who tend to take on this nature through a proximity to, and a clear propensity towards – mass hysteria.
SPRECHEN SIE DEUTSCH?
A few days after the spontaneous celebrations marking the conquest of the camp, the liberation of the prisoners and the dispatch of their jailers, under close arrest, to an unknown destination, I was summoned to an interview in the local Russian headquarters.
The Russians knocked politely on the door of the room I was renting in a hotel in the hamlet closest to the former camp and asked me, if it wasn’t too much trouble, to accompany them now or make an appointment some other day for what they described as a "clarification-meeting" – in the interests of both parties, they assured me, and unlikely to take up more than a few minutes of my time. As this was a late hour of a morning basking in sunlight, and it was my intention to take lunch in a garden by the side of a clear and tranquil lake, I expressed my willingness to go along with them without any delay, picked up my valise, a case made of camel-skin, the kind of thing used by doctors in those days, put into it two perfectly edible sandwiches and a ripe apple, and set out in their company.
We traveled in a jeep obtained by the Russians from the American logistics branch. The driver was one of the most accomplished among members of his profession, a group renowned for supreme skill and exemplary caution, and throughout the entire journey, three-quarters of a kilometer at least, he hit only two pedestrians – an elderly man and a child of about nine years old, who were taken to a nearby military hospital – and an orphaned telegraph pole which was already carrying only burnt-out wires on its shoulders. The impact tilted the pole on its side and it could be assumed that one further blow could easily uproot it. This looked like a pole of decidedly venerable age, turning black and longing for a peaceful existence on a pile of junk in some shady corner, no more carrying high-tension cables or standing dumb and erect, in the service of human beings and of winged creatures of various kinds. I am sure that on the return journey that genius of a driver guessed the pole’s earnest desire and promptly and generously set about putting it into effect, so at long last the pole tasted the serenity and deep-rooted satisfaction that go with a fully horizontal posture.
In the Russian headquarters they led me to one of the offices which in fact was just a narrow room, with a table crammed into it and two chairs, one on either side. The sentry who stood outside pointed to the chair with its back turned towards the door, clearly indicating that I was to sit there and not, perish the thought, on the other. I hastened to comply with his instruction as a way of reassuring him, having seen the look of tense anticipation in his troubled gaze.
Once I was seated the sentry promptly turned around, slammed the door shut and took up his position beside it, as before. A few minutes later an officer in a general’s uniform entered, completely bald and smartly shaved, diminutive of stature and with an incipient paunch. He greeted me, for some reason, in German, then moved to the other side of the table and sat down without looking in my direction. After a minute of emphatic silence he looked up, and fixing me with a glare that contrived to be both penetrating and blank, opaque even – addressed me in a style not at all in keeping with his appearance, his uniform, the equable atmosphere in the room and the refined manners to which I was accustomed:
"Sprechen sie Deutsch?"
I smiled at him gently, in a chivalrous attempt to restore to him the self-assurance and the dignity that his rank at least demanded, and answered him in a clear voice, devoid of any kind of fear or tension.
"Jawohl Herr General!"
The face of my host, as closely shaven as his head, lit up and he called out in the same incongruous, even undisciplined, tone of voice:
"Vassily!"
The door of the tiny office opened and in the doorway stood that sentry with the anxious look in his eyes that he had probably been born with.
"Arestovat!" the general commanded in pure Russian – "Arrest him!" He banged his little fist on the table which shuddered under the impact and, his round paunch palpitating under his uniform, he rose and left the office.
So I was arrested, charged with the offence of being a German-speaker. There and then I was taken and loaded into a closed and securely guarded truck, also of American manufacture, together with three other prisoners – a certain Jew who coughed in front of a portrait of the father-of-all-nations, an elderly Russian who referred to Stalingrad as Tsaritsyn, and that enigmatic Swede, Raoul Wallenberg, who informed the Russians that he had been employed by the American intelligence services.
The gloomy atmosphere in the iron cage did not last long because I soon embarked on the story of my own adventures and the adventures of my great-great-great-grandfather, the illustrious Hieronymus of the House of Munchausen.
After three days of jolting on roads that were no roads, with relays of drivers and constant refueling stops, not to mention seven accidents and three burst tyres, and improvised sanitation facilities of familiar kinds, my three traveling companions were focusing significant and portentous looks on my camel-hide valise which was, so it seemed, the only object capable of arousing any form of hope – the property they had been allowed to bring with them consisted of the skin covering their flesh, surmounted by tattered workaday clothes.
And sure enough, much to our delight my valise did not disappoint and the sandwiches, only slightly mouldy, gladdened our hearts and inspired the notion that all was not lost and so long as the Baron was with us – illustrious scion of an ancient family of knights, great-great-great grandson of that dauntless chevalier whose exploits will never be expunged from the chronicles of this fleeting and delightful planet of ours, teeming with humanity of all types and varieties – there was room for hope and hoping was worthwhile.
After a month of transfers from truck to truck and from train to train, interspersed with bracing hikes of hundreds of kilometers, occasionally receiving scraps of food courtesy of our magnanimous and compassionate guards, so typically Russian – we reached Siberia.
The cold was intense and the camp – exposed to winds from all directions. If Solzhenitsyn had been imprisoned there – we would never have had the opportunity of reading his famous novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch – since he would not have stayed alive. All the aids to survival which he described in his book had yet to be invented. Just a great open space, as far as the eye could see, and a howling wind as far as the ear could hear. And simple tents of old and patched canvas drooping at one end of the camp while at the other were the smoke-blackened huts of the guard detachment, whose lot was not much better than that of their prisoners. The diet consisted of gruel which was distributed once a day and its relationship to "gruel" constituted a riddle. The rumor went about that the solution to this riddle was buried deep in the guts of our more astute guards, insistent on surviving the particular conditions of the white wilderness and even – staying alive. The mixing liquid of this vanishing gruel was water. Hot water, almost boiling – of which we had an unstinting supply. This water strained the well-b
eing of the gut and stimulated the heart, raising in the mind, which was steadily and inevitably freezing, a fateful question – how to stay sufficiently alert to plan and also carry through, converting theory into practice, an original scheme of escape?
BEFORE LIGHT OF DAY
A whole year I spent in that camp and I had the leisure time I needed to study the Russian language in depth, something I had long wanted to do. For as long as I can remember I was always eager to read the world’s greatest novelists and poets in the original – the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Pushkin and Lermontov. And although I had to cope with the cold and the hunger, implacable heralds of the Angel of Death, I was grateful for the one-off opportunity given to me and resolved to make the most of it. I acquired a thorough knowledge of the musical Russian language, speaking with such fluency that no one, hearing me, would believe I was anything other than a Russian born and bred.
The cold grew more intense and not a single night passed without one of the camp inmates freezing to death on the wooden bench at the back of the tent; the body would be hustled outside quickly, before any of his companions could help themselves to cutlets of frozen meat, for the sake of their own survival. The guards were in a hurry to drag the corpse from the tent before light of day, but instead of taking it for burial they would toss it contemptuously to a pack of slavering guard dogs, which would attack with barks and whines, tearing and consuming, leaving not even the most paltry of bones as residue.
"At least," as a former general of the Red Army – accused of disloyalty to the Party, having hung the portrait of the Leader not in the lounge but in the kitchen – commented wryly, "the poor sod will be warmed up in the guts of the dogs!"
And there was one who agreed with him, saying this form of burial was not so bad, on the contrary, it was preferable in his view to interment in the icy ground, where the frozen corpse would not be welcomed even by the most abject of worms.