by Jay Cantor
After a few days without food and drink, the little left of Marianne felt desperate to go on living. She longed for a glass of water, but she didn’t want to betray a plan that she was sure was just on the point of success.
You’re being foolish, the kinder one wrote. You can’t please a man who hates himself by imitating him. He’ll never adopt you as his child—
—which you know, the brutal one wrote, is the one your mother truly wants.
Had she known? Of course, she must have. And as self-deception was what he and her mother both hated most, she felt as though she’d covered herself in her own urine.
Exhausted, she lay down on the floor and closed her eyes. She hoped for even a stuporous sleep, but the cold coming up her dress kept her awake. On the train, that chill would mean snow on the ground outside, and if she was lucky the snow would soon be so deep that they couldn’t move forward anymore and would have to remain in their compartment.
The wind through the train windows continued to sneak up her nightgown and made her teeth begin to chatter. Her mother tucked a shawl around her so she might sleep warmly through the night. She felt scratchy wool on her bare legs. She mouthed the word blue but said nothing out loud; she suspected the snow, the train, the blanket, the feeling was a fever dream and that she mustn’t speak or open her eyes, or even the last blue possibility might disappear forever.
2
AFTER MARIANNE’S CORPSE had been lowered into the ground next to her mother’s, the two mourners—Kafka’s niece and the old Yiddish writer, who had, just as he feared, buried almost everyone he knew—strolled for a few minutes in the nearly empty cemetery. The ground was hard underfoot, and the air cold enough to show itself before their faces.
“Poor Marianne,” Kafka’s niece said. “She was probably more representative than she knew. Trapped between the worship of a spirit who offers garbled guidance, and a materialism sure it knows the way forward.”
“And then leads one to the wall,” Isaac said. “You know, I met her father before the war. But I’m re-formed by age now, and he didn’t recognize me.” He smiled. “I’m all ears,” he said, and pushed one outward. “Her father lectured on Marxism to my agitprop group, and I had dinner once or twice at his family’s very nice house. The girl’s father, by the way, was ferociously jealous of your uncle.”
“As was my father,” Marianne Steiner said. “He felt he couldn’t compete with his brother-in-law.”
“There’s a lesson in that. If you ever meet someone who has known an angel, you should run away from her as fast as you can.” With difficulty, he took two long, high steps, but his old legs had begun to hurt again where they’d been broken long ago, and he returned to a methodical shuffle.
“Dora did have that air to her,” Marianne Stein said. “More even than my mother. I mean, that she felt she’d encountered a supernatural being.”
“Like Mary,” Isaac said. “Except that the ghost forgot to make her pregnant.”
“It felt like Dora had decided to spend her life reflecting on what she’d received. My mother had something of that about her, too.”
Isaac stopped to peer at the inscription on a grave, whose numbers summed to a short life. “Probably Dora shouldn’t have married again.”
“Or had a child,” Marianne Steiner said, with compassion, though for herself, mostly.
“She seemed very dedicated to this girl, though.”
“Yes, but even an infant,” Marianne Steiner said, quoting her own analyst, “requires that her mother need her a little bit, too, or she’ll be crushed by her own wanting.”
“That dinner in Berlin,” Isaac said, “the one where I met Marianne’s father, Brecht was there, also. The Lasks might not have known any angels, but they were an important family.” He stopped by a stone to get his breath.
“Maybe better if Dora had married Brecht,” Marianne said. “I’m told no one ever thought he was a saint.”
“Oh, the Great Seducer would have fucked her, but he wouldn’t have married her. He liked her breasts, I remember, but he feared her acting. Too hand on heart, O Schmerz! Schmerz! Schmerz!”
“One can understand his fear.” Marianne Steiner smiled at Isaac’s warbling cry. “After all, once one starts to wail, when will it ever end?”
“Should it end?” Isaac said. “Isn’t it a fine thing for man to say just that to his dear friends.” And once or twice as they walked along in silence, the old man bowed to the occupants of the graves and fondly, if mockingly, mouthed the words again.
MILENA JASENSKA AND
THE WORLD THE CAMPS MADE
1
ON OCTOBER 19, 1941, the Senior of Reception Block 7 brought Eva Muntzberg, the Senior for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a note from a political prisoner, Inge Heschel, who that week had been transferred with a hundred others to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp.
Eva Muntzberg had met Inge Heschel a year before, in the holding cell in the Alexanderplatz Gestapo Prison, where they’d been held with other politicals, Jews, race defilers, lesbians, and other asocials, mostly prostitutes, all of whom babbled anxiously of their coming transfers—though it had seemed to Eva that their chief worry hadn’t been beatings, hard labor, or the likelihood of starvation but that anyone found with lice in her hair would have her head shaved down to the skin. Many of the women had shrieked at the prospect.
Eva Muntzberg had already spent three years in Stalin’s labor camp in Karaganda—including three months in solitary—and her interest had narrowed to those things necessary to her survival. Hair had been useful once; on the steppes, a man had liked her and had shown her the proper way to weed so she wouldn’t break her back; but she didn’t believe it would help her anymore; the Gestapo would be as brutal but more rigorous than the Soviets, and all the other inmates would be women. Besides, desire was farther from her now than memories of infancy.
Still, those in the cell paired off and searched each other’s scalps for nits, and though Karaganda might have diminished Eva’s interest in her (or anyone’s) appearance, it had also taught her never to stand out. She’d partnered with Inge Heschel, whose name Eva had recognized as that of a famous political philosopher who’d studied with Husserl and Heidegger but who had become a Marxist, and even for a time a party member.
Eva had spread the strands of the professor’s graying hair, and in response to Inge’s questions, had told her about her experience in the NKVD prison in Moscow, in the labor camp, and of Stalin’s latest betrayal.
Inge’s questions made Eva think that she might be one of those who’d already had suspicions of Stalin, yet couldn’t believe they’d been lied to by the party whose structure Lenin had made flawless, and whose goal was humanity’s only chance to survive. Such people remained always unsure about the truth, like a quivering compass needle. Eva’s account today wasn’t much more than a bare recital of events, but the needle had finally pointed north, and Inge began to weep. “We’ve sacrificed ourselves,” Inge said, “and for what? What is there to live for now?”
Eva didn’t know how to respond. In 1928, in Berlin, a court had given Eva’s first husband and his family custody of her child; the court said her commitment to the party and to her lover, the party leader Paul Muntzberg, made her a negligent mother. In 1938, Stalin’s courts had taken both Paul and the party from her, and she’d been sentenced to hard labor in Karaganda. In an isolation cell there, and without her willing it, Eva had become hardly more than a small spot of consciousness, a thing of minimal want (so as not to be fooled by hallucinated bread), and minimal caring for those outside herself—to better bear the loneliness; and so, more or less, she’d remained. “We live,” she said to Professor Heschel, “in order to go on living,” a tautology that, not surprisingly, didn’t stop Inge’s weeping.
Eva, though, had nothing to add, or perhaps not sufficient interest in adding it, and Inge went on with her crying while Eva went on combing through her hair and crushing the lice between her ragged nails.
She spotted the small philosopher at the back wall of the camp, and she was glad to see that Inge hadn’t had her hair cut off; she wouldn’t have any additional reason—beyond Eva’s having destroyed her faith in Stalin—to resent Eva. Another woman, taller and younger, who dragged one foot when she walked, made her way alongside Inge, and both stopped when Eva approached. “Milena from Prague,” the tall woman said, and extended her hand. “Please don’t give me one of your German handshakes. My joints are terribly swollen.”
Eva took the woman’s palm. It felt pleasantly warm, but Eva had seen two women who’d held hands beaten to the ground in front of this wall, and the shorter one of them had died of the wounds to her spleen. She dropped Milena’s hand. Still, Eva’s spirit rose to the surface for a moment, and even looked about. The tall woman had a prisoner’s pallor already—the Gestapo’s jails, no doubt—and her boots were too large for her.
Even that much looking made Eva feel nauseated, like a starving man who ate too large a meal. But before her spirit retreated, she said, “You look like a scarecrow.” Eva was surprised by her own words, and that there had been words at all, but Milena laughed at them in a companionable way.
The path where they stood was a thin strip between the back of the barracks and the high masonry wall topped with electrified barbed wire. The inmates had to walk in a dreary line for the full exercise period, breathing the dust made by their own boots as they walked in a dreary line for the full exercise period. Even the guinea pigs who had been given gangrene in experiments at the infirmary had to lug themselves about on their crutches.
Women tried to push by them, one or two of them kicking at Eva’s calf—these were probably the party militants among the newcomers, already briefed by the comrades about Eva’s “lies.” Milena ignored the other prisoners, and her attitude struck Eva as entitled and presumptuous, but also fascinating, as if Milena thought she was still a free creature.
After a few moments, the three walked together with the others, and Eva was conscious of Milena’s right hand by the side of her dress. It made a slight perturbation in Eva’s spirit—a reminder of similar foolishness in the past. She’d grown fond of the man in Karaganda who’d shown her how to chop weeds, and his death had made her forget the simplest things. Someone had stolen her boots, and her feet had gotten sores that had become infected.
The Czech woman had been a famous left-wing journalist, and though Inge had told her Eva’s story, she said she wanted to hear directly from her that Stalin could really have betrayed every internationalist principal and delivered antifascist refugees over to Hitler. “I like to ask questions myself,” Milena said, “an old habit—”
“That liked you,” Inge said, “and stayed and never gave notice,” Rilke being to Inge, Eva supposed, what hair had been to the women in Alexanderplatz Prison, the thing that she must not lose if she were to remain herself. To Eva, Rilke’s poetry was another thing, like hair, for which she no longer had a use.
As to Milena’s questions, Eva knew she’d gain nothing from answering them. When she’d first arrived at Ravensbruck, she’d talked honestly about the slave labor camps, and the Communists took their revenge in ways as dangerous as spreading lies about her (to the inmates they said she was an informer, to the SS that she was a dangerous malcontent) and as petty as kicking her calves when History offered them the chance. But she saw a testing look on Milena’s face, and though she didn’t know what capacity Milena felt she was examining, or by what right, she responded, “Yes, that is what the party of the Workers’ Fatherland did to those who took refuge there from fascism.”
Milena asked more questions, and Eva had gotten as far as her flight to Moscow with her husband, a candidate for the Central Committee of the Internationale who’d disagreed with Stalin, though that may not have mattered very much in his arrest. Everyone substantial had been swept up, and, as in her case, many who weren’t.
But before the NKVD came for her, the siren sounded at Ravensbruck, the guards began to shout, and the dogs yearned forward on their chains. Milena turned as she rushed away, and said that she hoped Eva would come again to tell her more of her story.
She doubted it. Even with the green armband, she would need a plausible excuse if a guard stopped her, and if the guard didn’t like her story, or her manner, or was in a foul mood, she could lose her position as Block Elder, and even be sent to an isolation cell in the Punishment Bunker, where she knew she would retreat the rest of the way inside herself, and even the last, small remnant of Eva would disappear forever.
Still, the possibility that this woman wanted to hear more had reminded her of a time when she’d still occasionally felt the absence of a friend, a time before she’d learned that any organism may at some point need your ration of food more than your companionship. And that night, as the Witnesses slept or prayed quietly, she heard herself say Milena aloud.
2
FIVE MORE TIMES THAT WEEK, Eva took the risk needed to walk with Milena underneath the wall with the death heads painted on it. They were almost always joined by Inge, though the older woman said little.
Milena never mentioned her own hands again, or the hunger that all newcomers felt (which was, by the way, much less than it had been at Karaganda), the pain in the legs from work, and from standing in rows for hours morning and night to be counted and recounted, or the savagery of the guards if you strayed from your row—all the things about which new prisoners complained until they saw that the same pain already filled every other consciousness to the brimming point. Instead, Milena asked Eva more about her arrest, the prison in Moscow, the camp at Karaganda, and Eva answered, though to her own ears her account was like the rest of her existence: distant, colorless, and at once frightening and boring.
It was to Inge’s taste, though. One could tell, she said, that Eva had seen the emptiness of all the goals of this world. “Eva’s like Franz Kafka,” Inge said. “Or his Hunger Artist.”
“Who’s Franz Kafka?” Eva asked, though she did not much care.
“Franz Kafka,” Inge said, “was a great writer.”
“And he was my lover,” Milena said.
Apparently, that was momentous; Inge stopped walking and was pushed into Milena by some other prisoners, but she had the good sense to jump away, as if Milena’s body had been electrified.
Kafka, as it turned out, had been a Jew from Prague who’d written in German, and Milena had been his first translator into Czech. At the time, Milena lived with her husband in Vienna, and at first she and Kafka had corresponded about difficulties in his text; but her own pain had spilled over onto the page, and she began to write of her unfaithful, feckless husband, Ernst Polack, and Kafka had written of his loneliness and fear. In this way, they’d fallen in love. “He was not like anybody I’d ever known,” Milena said. “He never took refuge in blindness, in enthusiasm, in some conviction, the way the rest of us do. He let everything hurt him directly. It was like Franz was naked while everyone else had clothes on.”
Milena and this peculiar-sounding man had only ever spent a few days together in the flesh, and to Eva it sounded as if all they’d been able to do was embrace. The siren sounded before Milena could tell them the thing Eva was surprised to find that she was a little curious to hear—namely, why the two of them couldn’t fuck.
3
FOR THE FIRST TIME, hearing Eva’s story of Stalin’s camps produced a good result for her listeners. Inge and Milena had become the center of a tug-of-war between her and the party, and the Communists had seen to it that Inge was made secretary to the camp supervisor, and that Milena got a place as a clerk in the infirmary. These examples of the party’s benevolence were meant to prove that Eva must have lied about the nature of Communism, and so
of Stalin; QED: the camps didn’t exist.
To show the party that they no longer believed the Trotskyite’s lies, the two of them were told to break with Eva completely, and though Inge didn’t kick her when she passed by, she did dutifully turn away and pretend not to know her. Milena, though, continued to walk with her, which moved Eva deeply. No one had ever made a choice like that for her before; nor had she, in the past, chosen anyone, even her own child, over the party.
Milena said she did it because she needed to amass material for the book she’d decided she and Eva would write after the war, The World That Was the Camps. But that reason was nonsense. Milena couldn’t write down any of what Eva said, and couldn’t possibly remember it. The idea of a book must be meant to help Eva believe that the Nazis would be defeated, that the two of them would be still alive when the camp was liberated, and that the Soviets would not be the army to do that, in which case Eva would be arrested again, and probably shot. All of that was far more hope than Eva could manage.
Like most things that asked for a response from her, Eva felt Milena’s questions as an annoyance, but each time Milena asked, she found that, to her surprise, she answered. Today she spoke of the transport that had taken her to Karaganda.
Milena stared up at the electrified barbed wire, where a gypsy had recently lost part of her hand as she tried to escape. “There are,” Milena said, “no scarecrows in your stories.”
It took Eva a moment to remember. “You mean no people like you?”
“No, not that.” Milena shut her eyelids and stumbled forward. “What color are my irises?”