by John Lawton
“You have no yellow star? Why are you mixed in with all this Jew-shit? One would almost think you wished to die.”
The boot pressed the hand into the ground, the cutlery digging into her flesh. Just when she thought her knuckles would crack a voice said, “Really, Bruno, if you break her fingers we shall never know how well she plays.”
A second Sturmbannführer had appeared at the side of the first, one hand upon the arm in gentle restraint, and behind him, lurking, almost cowering, not daring to meet her eyes, was a scrawny figure in a dirty pleated skirt and a lavender-coloured headscarf. Magda Ewald—once a trombonist of the Vienna Youth Orchestra. Méret had not seen her in years.
“It seems she’s a cellist, and the orchestra of the Frauenkonzentrationslager has need of a cellist.”
With this the first Sturmbannführer lost interest.
“Take the cunt, leave the cutlery,” was all he said.
§42
It was about two hours later. She had lost Magda and clung to one thought—that she might find her again.
Time and geography had dissolved. She had marched—at least that was what the Germans had told them to do: “Links, links, schnell, schnell!” It had been more of a ragged, slow footed shuffle—from the ramp, across a muddy crust of trampled snow, through a gate in the barbed wire into a world of barbed wire. Single-storey blockhouses, laid to a grid—row upon row like a motionless machine in bricks and mortar. All the fit young women: none of them too elderly, none of them too young, none of them infirm.
Now she stood naked in the snow, dripping wet from a cold shower, robbed of her clothes, blue with cold, her entire body a moonscape of goose pimples, a smear of blood on her thighs from her broken hymen. The rape of the rubber glove. One of a dozen naked, bloodied women.
The tattoo on her left arm was stinging. She scratched at it and looked down. A five figure number ending 757 . . .
A female guard swathed in an SS greatcoat, feet snug in sheepskin-lined boots, yelled that they should move into the next hut—“All’interno! All’interno! Hinein! Hinein!”—and when Méret obediently moved with the others the guard rapped her across the belly with her stick.
“Not you.”
She would not watch as the rest of the women were herded in with kicks and slaps and blows from truncheons, and turned away. There was Magda, less than six feet from her. Stock still, feet planted firmly in the snow, hands clasped in front of her. She reminded Méret of a nun. She was pitifully thin, although her eyes seemed to be shining.
“I know what you’re feeling,” she said.
“You do?”
“You’re feeling that you will die now. But you can no longer trust your feelings. You may very well die, but not today. You may very well live, but who knows for how long? You may survive. I have.”
“How . . . how . . . long have you . . . ?”
“Since the summer of 1942. Or did you think I’d taken an extended holiday? Now, follow me.”
The ice cut her feet, a snail trail pink in the snow as she walked behind Magda, between the first and second blocks to a third one behind.
“You will not believe this, at least not right now, but you are lucky. Since last summer they have killed only Jews on arrival. Doesn’t mean they won’t find a reason to kill you at any point, but right now the master race is too busy exterminating Jews to bother much about us.”
“Exterminating?”
“By the thousand, by the hundred thousand—by now it could be millions.”
They had reached the hut. Magda threw the door wide and motioned Méret inside.
“All those people who arrived when I did—the Italians?”
There was a pile of clothes dumped on a table. They were not clean clothes. Nor were they her own clothes. There was a pile of shoes on the floor.
“Pick what fits. Find a skirt, a blouse, and a headscarf. Whatever you can find to wear on top of that and keep out the cold. You don’t have to wear stripes and they won’t shave your head, that’s your first privilege—and this is a world of privilege and denial—it makes humanity much easier to control—but if I were you I’d keep it short and always wear a headscarf. You’ll be less likely to get lice.”
“Privileged. Why privileged?”
“What size shoes? I’ll try and find two in the same style.”
“Thirty-six. And you’re not answering a single question.”
Magda knelt on the floor sifting through the shoes. Méret pulled on a pair of cream-coloured cotton knickers with a sense of disgust readily overcome by the greater sense of cold and naked.
“Oh, I can answer any question you like and save you the fun of finding out for yourself. The Italians? They are dead by now. Men with pliers are pulling out their gold teeth as we speak. In a matter of hours their bodies will be ashes. When the ashes are cold, men with rakes will sift them for any gold they might have missed. And in the spring, in two or three months women less privileged than us will scatter those ashes on the ground as fertilizer for corn. And next autumn we shall eat the bread of the dead.
“Meanwhile, the better quality clothes in which they arrived will be shipped west for the benefit of Aryan Hausfraus in Germany. The tat will be reserved for us. So much depends on when they were taken. We have had people arrive straight from the opera, straight from weddings—what are the Germans to do with all those top hats? How many curtains can one make out of a bridal dress? And once, an entire hockey team, seized at half time. It’s probably why you and I have pleated skirts and matching blouses to wear on days when we need to look like a marching band. Somewhere there will be piles—no mountains, mountains of things the Germans do not quite know what to do with—all those suitcases, all those pairs of spectacles to dispose of. At least the false teeth are incinerated with their owners. Burned up with the dead.
“Privilege? Well, it saved your life today. You were dealing with one of the biggest bastards in the camp when I spotted you. Jew or no Jew he’d have wasted a bullet on you if you’d gone on provoking him. But Schönbeck was at hand, and when I told him who you were he grabbed you for the Frauenkonzentrationslager orkestra. You’re our new cellist. I do hope you like Strauss waltzes. We play them every Sunday at the behest of the commandant. And, as you’ll have heard, we play tangos almost daily. We have turned the dance of love into the march of the dead.”
It was too much. Her body began to shake beyond control. Wet tears upon her cheeks, wet blood upon her thighs. All she wished was that Magda would take her in her arms.
She didn’t.
She fished around among the topcoats—found a green woollen jacket in a small size and threw it to Méret to catch. Her arms dangled at her side, useless appendages. The jacket bounced off her breasts and fell to the floor. The tide of disgust rose in her throat.
“Magda, whose clothes are these?”
“Why take ye thought for raiment?”
It was a line from the bible. Something from the New Testament. It was the predicate to something often quoted. Méret could not remember what.
Magda continued to sort through the pile of cast-offs, not looking at her, muttering to herself almost savagely, hissing, ironic curse rather than the words of Christ, “Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you?”
“Magda, please! Whose clothes are these?”
“O ye of little faith.”
Méret had never heard those five words sound so sneeringly abused, so stripped of meaning.
She bent to pick up the jacket. Magda reached into her pocket and tossed a needle and thread, bound around a small piece of cardboard, down onto it.
“You’ll need those.”
Rummaging now in the other pocket of her skirt.
“And this.”
Méret watched it float down, eddying like an autumn leaf to land on the jacket. A scrap of cotton, a scarlet triangle.
“Sew it on. It means you’re a
political prisoner.”
She who had no politics.
O ye of little faith.
§43
Magda led her outside once more, across a desert of churned snow mingling with yellow clay, and into another blockhouse. It was heated by a potbellied stove and for the first time since she stepped out of the Konservatorium to catch the tram a lifetime ago, she felt warmth around her.
It was a big room, almost split in two by a raised brick platform running down the centre like the spine of some long-dead reptile, surrounded by musical intruments. And along the walls, rising up to the roof beams, bunk upon bunk upon bunk.
“More privilege. In Block Twelve you get your own bunk. The rest of them are packed into concrete tiers like sticks of french bread in a baker’s oven. Five, six . . . a dozen to a platform. An experiment in sharing vermin. Here you will never have to wake up next to a corpse. And, of course, our room is always heated. It helps to keep the piano in tune. That it stops us from freezing is no doubt a coincidence.”
She stopped in front of a tier of bunks.
“The top one is free.”
“Magda. Why do you talk to me as if I had offended you?”
Whatever answer Magda might have made was drowned out by the return of the ladies’ orchestra—thirty or forty women, some of them even younger than she was herself—all dressed as ragbag as she was herself—some with long hair tucked under scarves, others shaved back to stubble, red triangles and yellow stars. A dozen nationalities—French, German, Dutch, Belgian, Polish—a flurry of names she would struggle to remember until she had learned to associate name to face to instrument. Once she had the instrument fixed, everything else would fall into place.
§44
In the darkness, the blockhouse chatter subsided into fits of sleep and Magda slipped into the bunk beside her, enfolded her in her arms, and whispered in her ear.
“We can live through this. I don’t mean that we can be spared the arbitrariness of killing. They will kill for a whim. But we can survive if we know the rules.
“Guard your bowl and spoon or you’ll never get to eat. Never put them down outside the block.
“Eat slowly, it fills the stomach better that way, but never, ever save anything for later. It will be stolen.
“Avoid anyone with a black or green triangle. Prostitutes and murderers.
“Never give food away.
“Never share food.
“Never speak to a guard unless spoken to.
“And never go to the assistance of anyone in trouble or their fate will be yours, too.”
§45
The musicians were spared Appell. Through the window of the blockhouse Méret could see row upon row of ragged women in prison stripes. It was dawn and they had already been standing for hours. It was torture—torture by cold, torture by endurance, and torture by boredom. She had been familiar with the latter all her life. It was the first demonstration of power in the life a child. The ability of those with power to waste your time, to insult your intelligence with boredom and futility.
Magda appeared next to her.
“I have to play now. We all have to play now. We play them out to work and we play them back again.”
“And me?”
“Not today. Another privilege. Just wait here.”
A few minutes later a dissonant Arbeitsmarsch was struck up somewhere outside.
At the end of the blockhouse a wooden partition carved two rooms out of the barracks. One for the blockowa, one for the orchestra conductor. A door opened. A woman in her mid-thirties emerged. Tall, lots of dark-brown hair swept back. It was a familiar figure from her youth, one of the best-known musicians in Vienna—Alma Rosé, daughter of Arnold Rosé, leader of the Vienna Philharmonic, and a niece of Gustav Mahler. She had led the Wiener Walzermädeln, a small orchestra renowned for the saccharine musical clichés for which Vienna was famous. In the mid-thirties it had pleased her father to take her to see the Wiener Walzermädeln two or three times. They put on a “show.” They wore billowing ball gowns that trailed along the floor. They played the kind of music that set his foot tapping, waltzed away his worries, and whisked him back to the turn of the century as surely as a bottle and a half of red wine. It was the kind of music Viktor Rosen abhorred. Too much of a good thing.
“You are our new cellist.”
It wasn’t a question. Méret said nothing. Alma swept an errant lock of hair back over her right ear—a gesture that took Méret back to a thé dansant that had bored her silly seven or eight years ago. She could see Alma Rosé in her ball gown, she could feel her father’s hand enfolding hers.
“Do you know who I am?”
“Yes. I knew you at once. I heard the name Alma last night many times. I did not think it could be you because no one told me it was and because I heard a rumour in Vienna that you had escaped to London.”
“I had. My mistake was I came back. Come, follow me.”
Inside the kapo’s room, Alma had set a cello on a stand. It was cheaply made. In so far as any musical instrument can be mass-produced, it was mass-produced. A bullet had entered at the front, just high of the left ƒ-hole, and exited not in a hole but in a two-foot-long split at the back.
“Do you think you can cope with it?”
Méret sat, quickly tuned up, and played a minute or so of Debussy’s cello sonata.
“It’s awful. There is a bad vibration along the split—if I were to demand volume of the instrument it would sound more like an orange box than a cello, but the neck is fine. It is not twisted. It seems to stay in tune.”
“Good. It’s all we have. When I saw you make your debut with Viktor Rosen in 1936, you played a beautiful instrument. What was it?”
“A Mattio Goffriler. 1707.”
“When I went into hiding in Holland I left behind a Guadagnini violin dating from 1757.”
It seemed they had exchanged sympathies, a common experience in the loss of an instrument that did nothing to take the crispness out of their meeting. It wasn’t an audition—that much was clear—it merely felt like an audition. They were cast in their respective roles. The individuals in them had not touched. They, too, were lost.
“You can copy parts, I take it?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“I need something large, something loud, something German. We are orchestrating Beethoven’s Fifth. They seem to want it. Imagine, not enough violins, not enough percussion, no violas at all, one trombone, two flutes, three guitars, five mandolins, a piano, two accordions, and they ask for Beethoven. Thank God they didn’t ask for the Ninth or half a dozen of us would be masquerading as a choir. Could you copy out the parts?”
“Of course. Do we have music paper?”
§46
Her first task was to make music paper. There was ample white paper, and her first adjustment to the mentality of a prisoner was in wondering how Alma had obtained white paper. Patiently she ruled on the staves and took a childish pleasure in drawing in the clefs. The swirl of the treble clef had delighted her since before she learnt to read. In drawing it she was inscribing the key to another world. Her second adjustment to the mentality of a prisoner was to realize that anyone could copy music and that in leaving her alone at the long table in the rehearsal room, while everyone else played marches and tangos in the freezing snow, Alma had given the new girl a break.
Whenever the orchestra stopped, the sound of the camp burst through—bad as the orchestra was, the camp’s real sound was a cacophony of whistles and bells, gunfire and screams, dogs barking, men shouting, boots banging, trains hooting. There was never a moment of silence.
She had looked out of the window. A maze of barbed wire. Tall chimneys belching black smoke, the grey, greasy haze low in the sky. Men and women resembling stick insects, beaten into line—into fives, always into fives, the German number for everything—beaten into marching, a rippling wave of dirty blue and white stripes.
As she watched, not fifty yards from the window a woman
slipped and fell. The guards kicked her until she rose again, and when she fell again and made no further move to rise, they set the dogs on her.
She turned away, inscribed a treble clef and accepted the invitation to that other world.
She had no idea how long she had managed to lose herself. Music, which all her life had enabled her to blot out anything, like a glass wall, was now a sieve, and she could not control what slipped through. The orchestra was still playing, and beneath the wrong notes of a badly played tango she could still hear the noise of the camp.
A sheet of loosened snow fell past the window. Over her head she could hear the bumps of heavy-footed workmen, scraping away, patching the roof. She quickly filtered the sound out of her mind. Knowing what the noise meant made all the difference.
She had lost herself for several more minutes reading the score of a lively dance by the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera when she heard a tapping at the window behind her on the far side of the room, leaking in through her sieve.
An arm ending in a lightly clenched fist was hanging down, poised to tap again. She opened the window and looked up. A man’s face, a blue and white striped cap clinging on precariously, was looking down at her.
“Parlez-vous francais? Parla italiano? Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” he asked without pausing to let her choose.
“All of those,” she replied. “But I’m Austrian. From Vienna.”
“Ah. I am French. Georges Pasdeloup. Citizen of Paris. Communist. Prisoner. Roofer . . . et . . . Résistance!”