Lovely Green Eyes

by Arnost Lustig

  She did not understand. She was afraid of diarrhoea. She realized that this did not depend on the degree of danger. Fear was corroding her inhibitions, her judgement. It probably was not just cowardice. She felt sick again, but did not want to throw up.

  “You are neither rose nor thorn,” he said.

  A pity no-one saw him here, he thought. He was Knight’s Cross material; indeed the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds. He would bet his right arm on it.

  He got up. She had to move to make room for him. He began to put his clothes back on. He complained, just to keep the conversation going, about a commission that was due to arrive. They didn’t like the killing of the circumcised. Damned snoopers, sticking their noses in where they had no business. He pulled on his tight, wool-lined gloves. On his hands they looked like artificial limbs.

  Obersturmführer Stefan Sarazin strode out in his hobnailed boots. He slammed the cubicle door behind him.

  Seconds later, still in her black underwear, Skinny stepped into the icy water of the tub, with the suds and the dirt of the officer, goose-flesh all over her, and a heavy weight in her stomach and guts.

  Part Three

  Nine

  Her talks with Rabbi Gideon Schapiro in Pecs were mostly one-sided. The rabbi would ask questions and Skinny would answer them; often more openly than she might have otherwise out of respect for the rabbi’s authority. Sometimes she remained silent and the rabbi went on asking questions, until he fell silent. Ten days and ten nights. She wondered whether rabbinical authority had undergone a change -she had seen rabbis at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they had been no different from the other inmates. Rabbi Schapiro did not know Czech, and Skinny did not know Hungarian. They talked in German. She felt no surprise at the sequence of events that had brought her to him in Hungary, by a roundabout route, after the war. The war had stirred Europe like a huge spoon stirring a cauldron of soup for 250 million people.

  She sensed in him a degree of consideration that she was not accustomed to. He was trying to accept something that went beyond his comprehension, but he was careful that she did not take it personally. He was the only person to whom – for some reason or other, perhaps to get it off her chest – she told everything. She stripped herself bare. She felt relief that it was behind her. Did that mean it was no longer present? It turned out that even what had happened at No. 232 Ost was not irreversible. Nothing was irreversible. She was too tired or too unsure of herself to declare an all-out war on those 21 days. The rabbi was aware of dissonance in her story, but he felt her to be a kindred soul, and they ended up closer than Skinny had originally intended. Rabbi Schapiro had a gentle voice, a little hoarse as if he had a cold, and he felt inside him a second voice prompting him. She noticed that he looked at her as if he were seeing himself. He never raised his voice, but she could hear in it an anger that was not directed at her, an anger that was new to her. It made her believe that he was growing with it. In reality, the rabbi was ducking for cover. He had deep brown eyes which at times seemed wild to her. They had trusted one another from the moment they had met, when she’d been taken to him by two railwaymen whose addresses she had been given in Katowice.

  “Child,” he had said. This was his first word to her when the men had gone. He didn’t have to ask her age, he could tell that himself. And he didn’t have to ask how she felt: he only had to look into her face with his brown eyes in which, on several occasions later, she would see tears.

  “What are we?” he asked, more into the void than to her, like a rhetorical question. “A lump of flesh and a broken soul.”

  From her reaction he realized at once that he had made a mistake. And he made many mistakes – but he did not repeat this one.

  “You were in a house that God had abandoned,” the rabbi said.

  That determined their relationship. At times she did not know how the rabbi viewed her; she found no answer in his eyes. He was feeling as helpless as the inmates of the concentration camps; assailed by questions to which there was no answer. One question that the rabbi asked again and again was: where was God? He glanced at the bookcase that contained his sacred books. They seemed to him to be running away as though they were made of water, trickling down the shining glass across from the window with its heavy red curtains.

  At times she felt that he was expecting her to answer this question, which God did not answer.

  “Each one who has survived is a messenger,” he sighed.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  She realized that conditions in Hungary had been different from those in Bohemia or Poland. There, the anti-Jewish laws came into force only at the beginning of 1944. Unlike to the Terezin ghetto, Eichmann came to Hungary late, managing to kill only half the Hungarian Jews, some 400,000.

  The rabbi had before him a child who spoke of a brothel in the way that a miller might speak of the flour he had milled, filled into sacks and weighed, or a bricklayer of a wall he had built from stones and bricks. Or else she was silent like an animal. He had not seen Skinny on that first Friday in December, when, after her first shift, she had washed off the dried blood from the inside of her thighs. She had been afraid to look at her crotch, which resembled a raw, bleeding gum.

  It was all new to him, just as it had been new to her, different then and now. Her erstwhile now refused to transform into a present-day then. She did not know that every one of her words dealt a fatal blow to the rabbi. He thought of concepts like honour, humiliation, violation. He had a vision of scales on which he was trying to weigh that which cannot be weighed or measured. He thought of the right of the stronger and the form into which it had developed before the middle of the 20th century, 40 centuries after his own ancestors had decided to outlaw killing; to outlaw human sacrifice. What had happened to justice, which must be for everyone or else evaporate altogether like the steam from a saucepan? He bore each word she uttered as a reproach, a reproach he accepted for himself. Her experience conflicted with all the sacred and civil codes that he was acquainted with. He searched his mind: what had become of morality? Where did the idea of the worthlessness of human life come from? How did the difference between giving and taking life disappear? How was injustice measured? Fortunately Skinny knew nothing of his thoughts.

  They were sitting facing each other. The rabbi had two large comfortable armchairs. She stretched out her legs in front of her, while he tucked his under his chair.

  Could he understand the Oberführer, nicknamed The Frog, if he credited him with a twisted brain? With sick ideas? If he likened him to a pig?

  “We are like a stone in the swamp,” the rabbi said.

  She did indeed feel a little like that.

  “It was confusion,” the rabbi said next. “Evil pretended to be good, the filthy disguised itself as clean. Sickness was proclaimed health and the plague was pronounced fresh air. The decayed pretended to be fresh. The low acted as if it were exalted, stupidity as if it were wisdom. It’s all behind you now.”

  The word “decay” recurred in the rabbi’s conversation every day. At night he dreamed of it.

  “I could not be a just judge, even if I wanted to be.”

  “Nor could I,” she agreed.

  “No-one like you could.”

  “Probably not.”

  An understanding grew between them. The rabbi was her confessor and her mirror. She could identify with much of what he said, even though he spoke little. She enjoyed the fact that she didn’t have to watch every word or control her slightest movement.

  “At first I didn’t know what was happening. In Terezin we were living almost normally – it was a transit station. But even in the east, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, I knew only a part of what was going on. No-one knew, except the girls they brought in for clerical duties in the Gestapo offices. They gassed these girls, after no more than six weeks, and then brought in new ones. But eventually I got to know. I felt as if I was in a camp in myself. Everyone who was there must have felt the same way. Th
ey left us together, but so that we were alone, separated from one another. I felt that I was surrounded by high-voltage wires, as though I was the last person on earth. And if it was a hill, then I stayed at the bottom. I didn’t need a panoramic view, I knew what was waiting for me. Those around me went to the gas chamber, one after another. Sometimes there was a short delay, but all of them in the end. Everything was temporary. There was only the now and the past, nothing that was yet to come.”

  “… on our knees,” said the rabbi.

  He asked himself whether the soul can refuse something which the body cannot refuse but must accept. In his mind he visited the place Skinny had described for him. He had never been in a brothel and regarded it as a place where men dropped their commitments. He knew what was written in the old books about Sodom and Gomorrah. Now Sodom had acquired a new name – Auschwitz-Birkenau, Feldbordell No. 232 Ost, Germany, Europe. It occurred to him that the Bible should be amplified by what people like Skinny brought back from the camps. Hadn’t the Bible been written by people not much older than Skinny? By ploughmen, carpenters and tanners, after the day’s work that was their livelihood? From the experiences they gathered, which did not lose their significance even after 2,000 years?

  Yes, the line between good and evil, between the appropriate and the false, has been blurred, he thought. The boundaries have ceased to be clear. There is a long way from yes to no, and the end is not in sight.

  He did not speak of the Ten Commandments, because he no longer considered them as all-embracing and all-applying, as the sum total of all that is under the stars, of what is allowed and what is forbidden, what one ought or ought not to do. He discovered the power and the curse of imagination. An inner voice told him that he could trust it. A terrible, sinful thought struck him: was there still a God, and if there was, was he not perhaps powerless?

  As they sat in the twilight of the first of those ten days she spent at his house, Rabbi Schapiro said: “I would like to be in your place.”

  “You wouldn’t,” she replied.

  “We were living in a pagan world,” the rabbi whispered, but so that at least he could hear himself. “They had their personal god, their golden calf, their degenerate idea. They wanted to have and proclaim their hoarfrost giants as in their ancient times, and they found one. Their giant of evil.”

  They both knew who he meant. He avoided uttering the name of the man he regarded as the personification of evil, the evil from which the devil arose; as the sum total and quintessence of all time, looking both back and forward, whose spirit continued to move through light and shade, noise and silence, enveloping them like a dark, invisible but perceptible cloud. Who would in future remember his date of birth in the quiet little Austrian town, feel sorry for his mother and his unknown father, and bless the accident that he had no children?

  He saw evil producing the germs of further evil, as when a fire flares up and its sparks light new fires on all sides; a huge conflagration engulfing the whole world. He saw the face of the man with a small moustache, as he had appeared on countless pictures and postage stamps, in school books and newspapers, on posters at every street corner, in the windows of zealous champions of his ideas, a man with a shock of dark hair, with burning eyes almost screaming from their sockets. For a long while the rabbi kept his eyes closed, his eyelids marked by fine blue and blood-red veins, the lids purple from lack of sleep, from anxiety and fatigue, from the burden of evil.

  He felt that evil had settled in him and on him, like sweat and dirt from an exhausting journey to a destination he had not yet reached and perhaps never would. The journey of Skinny, Hanka Kaudersovâ, in that coal-tender to Pecs in Hungary was only one part.

  He didn’t have to disprove to himself that life was an obscure journey from birth to death, one on which only a handful of the chosen started out, travelled, and departed with dignity. Not many could keep their dignity while journeying. And so he looked at the girl from the army brothel, now in his house, as though through a window onto something he hadn’t seen before or perhaps even known existed.

  Where were those good people, those strong people, those who knew what evil was when it was still in the bud? What questions will their children and their children’s children ask them some day? What will they ask those who did not know? The rabbi put this question to the void.

  “Where were those who saw what was happening and closed their eyes to it? Who did not even open them when they woke up? What were they doing?”

  No answer came back to him from the void, because the void does not even produce an echo. The rabbi thought of the unforgettable parables and elucidation of the Old Testament he had once admired so much, of the innumerable writings, the records of oral tradition, the wisdom of the wisest rabbis, the proverbs of Solomon, the songs of the Biblical poets, the clarity, clear-sightedness and power of truth uttered, come what may, regardless of those in power, by the prophets. That which transcended time and place with deceptive general validity, a boundless and universal validity.

  In his mind’s eye he saw a goshawk flying over a field, diving down, from an enormous height that gave it a view far and wide, onto a small fieldmouse which had no idea of what threatened it until it was too late, until it was in the claws of the bird of prey. He could hear the rush of the bird’s wings and the squeak of the little mouse.

  “Will all those with a conscience now have a hole in their soul?” the rabbi asked in a whisper. “Is modesty still a virtue or is it the false sister of excuse for those I know and do not know, and also for myself, if it relates to what cannot be explained, to what I do not attempt to explain?”

  Skinny didn’t reply. She was digesting an ample midday meal after an even more ample dinner the previous evening.

  “You witnessed the ugliness of the world,” the rabbi whispered. Perhaps he didn’t even want her to hear.

  Had the brutality of children who didn’t yet know the miracle of life become the brutality of adults because they never grew up? Had it been due to their character, to circumstances, schooling, youth organizations, the army and the many other institutions which had sprung up all over Europe?

  Are those who were sure of themselves confused, or are those who were confused sure of themselves?

  Is it a punishment for the fact that too many people allowed just a handful to make the decisions?

  Is it possible by the waving of a hand to turn human beings into refuse and the world into a refuse heap?

  He could still hear those who proclaimed the New Order; the breaking up of what belonged together, as if it were possible to improve the daylight or the brilliance of night, the brightness of the stars, the song of birds, the colour of a lilac bush, of a lucerne flower amid the clover, the crimson of a wild poppy or the slenderness of a stalk of wheat.

  The purity of conscience.

  The sweet breath of hope.

  The innocence of a two-year-old. The transparency of a tear.

  There was no end to it. His soul was like a bottomless pit without echoes, a soundless cry, a deafening silence.

  “Why did they do it?” he whispered. “How could they have done it?”

  What pleasure was there in killing people whom the killer didn’t even know?

  What could he invoke, which face of God? The God of infinity? The God of wisdom? The God of vengeance? The God of thunderbolts? Or the God of mercy? The God of goodness? The God of the 30 paths of wisdom? The God of the 50 gates of light? The God with the fiery sword? The God of the Covenant?

  He had begun to doubt the God of speech. He could invoke only the God of silence. But wherever he looked, more was concealed than apparent. Perhaps these Gods existed only in his imagination? But were they not written about in the sacred books? Where was the God of justice? The God of right? God the saviour? He who was everlasting, unutterable, glorious, infinite, indulgent, good, incomprehensible?

  The rabbi remembered how, as a young man, he had been excited by the three worlds, the higher, middle and lo
wer world, and their relation to the human body which also contained three worlds – head, breast, and the body from the waist down.

  It seemed to him improper to reflect on this in connection with Skinny. The body from the waist down and, with the girl before him, also from the waist up. Shell, transient substance and core. Blood corpuscles? Head, nerves, breast, blood, stomach and lymph, spirit, emotions and instinct, the life of the cells? He was not thinking of the second phase of creation, of procreation. She had told him about Dr Krueger’s experiments, of how he had sterilized her. About Dr S chimmelpfennig’s injections. About the psychological interrogations conducted by Oberführer Dr Blatter-Spirit. He could visualize the soldiers telling her about their families, their girlfriends, mothers and sisters, about their children. The officers, NCOs and men for whom going to war was like going to work. Their daily bread.

  He did not see the beginning, he only saw the continuation. He knew now where Skinny had been and what she had done. He tried to see her ordeal in conjunction with justice, so that he would not attribute even a shadow of guilt where it was not due. He could not explain what even religion had no answers to. He was confused and disoriented. He reflected on boundless shamelessness. She had wanted to stay alive, and she could stay alive by undergoing what she had endured. When is staying alive a sin, or wanting to stay alive? When is the mere wish to stay alive blasphemy? The rabbi found himself at a point he had not reached before. There was no longer a yes or no answer. A position of good and bad, of right and wrong. What was a lie and what just an error? What was just and what unjust?

  He wished it were simpler, for himself and for her. As wide open as the sea when he stood at its shore; as the sky when he looked up. Not disappearing in a fog as the stars at dawn or a shadow at night. The line between justice and sin, between blasphemy and honour. Not an accusation against those who were unable to defend themselves.

  Rabbi Gideon Schapiro felt that in a land without God, in a world without God, among people without God, under the pulled-down pillars of the heavenly vault, an unbearable burden fell upon him, like boulders that would crush even the strongest man.