Music had the power to express the last turmoil of a soul in whose blind depths every experience, every moment of joy and grief, had fused with this misty morning, this glow hanging over their heads. Or perhaps it wasn’t like that at all. Perhaps music was just the key to a man’s feelings, not what filled him at this terrible moment, but the key that unlocked his innermost core.
In the same way, a child’s song can appear to make an old man cry. But it isn’t the song itself he cries over; the song is simply a key to something in his soul.
As the column slowly formed into a half-circle round the square, a cream-coloured car drove through the camp gates. An SS officer in spectacles and a fur-collared greatcoat got out and made an impatient gesture; the conductor, who had been watching him, let his hands fall with what seemed like a gesture of despair and the music broke off.
A number of voices shouted ‘Halt.’ The officer walked down the ranks; sometimes he pointed at people and the guard called them out. He looked them over casually while the guard asked in a quiet voice – so as not to disturb his thoughts: ‘Age? Occupation?’
Thirty people altogether were picked out.
Then there was another command:
‘Doctors, surgeons!’
No one responded.
‘Doctors, surgeons, come forward!’
Again – silence.
The officer walked back to his car. He had lost interest in the thousands of people in the square.
The chosen were formed up into ranks of five and wheeled round towards the banner on the camp gates: ‘Arbeit macht frei’. A child in the main column screamed, then some women; their cries were wild and shrill. The chosen stood there in silence, hanging their heads.
How can one convey the feelings of a man pressing his wife’s hand for the last time? How can one describe that last, quick look at a beloved face? Yes, and how can a man live with the merciless memory of how, during the silence of parting, he blinked for a moment to hide the crude joy he felt at having managed to save his life? How can he ever bury the memory of his wife handing him a packet containing her wedding ring, a rusk and some sugar-lumps? How can he continue to exist, seeing the glow in the sky flaring up with renewed strength? Now the hands he had kissed must be burning, now the eyes that had admired him, now the hair whose smell he could recognize in the darkness, now his children, his wife, his mother. How can he ask for a place in the barracks nearer the stove? How can he hold out his bowl for a litre of grey swill? How can he repair the torn sole of his boot? How can he wield a crowbar? How can he drink? How can he breathe? With the screams of his mother and children in his ears?
Those who were to remain alive were taken towards the camp gates. They could hear the other people shouting and they were shouting themselves, tearing at the shirts on their breasts as they walked towards their new life: electric fences, reinforced concrete towers with machine-guns, barrack-huts, pale-faced women and girls looking at them from behind the wire, columns of people marching to work with scraps of red, yellow and blue sewn to their chests.
Once again the orchestra struck up. The people chosen to work entered the town built on the marshes.
Dark water forced its way sullenly and mutely between heavy blocks of stone and slabs of concrete. It was a rusty black and it smelt of decay; it was covered in green chemical foam, filthy shreds of rag, bloodstained clothes discarded by the camp operating-theatres. It disappeared underground, came back to the surface, disappeared once more. Nevertheless, it forced its way through – the waves of the sea and the morning dew were still present, still alive in the dark water of the camp.
Meanwhile, the condemned went to their death.
46
Sofya Levinton was walking with heavy, even steps; the little boy beside her was holding her hand. His other hand was in his pocket, clutching a matchbox containing a dark brown chrysalis, wrapped in cotton wool, that had just emerged from the cocoon. The machinist, Lazar Yankevich, walked beside them; his wife, Deborah Samuelovna, was carrying a child in her arms. Behind him, Rebekka Bukhman was muttering: ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God!’ The fifth person in the row was the librarian Musya Borisovna. She had put up her hair and the nape of her neck seemed quite white. Several times during the journey she had exchanged her ration of bread for half a mess-tin of warm water. She never grudged anyone anything. In the wagon she had been looked on as a saint; the old women, good judges of character, used to kiss her dress. The rank in front consisted of only four people; during the selection the officer had called out two men from this rank straight away, a father and son, the Slepoys. In reply to the question about profession, they had shouted out, ‘Zahnarzt’.fn1 The officer had nodded; the Slepoys had guessed right, they had won life. Three of the men left in the rank walked with their arms dangling by their sides; it was as though they no longer needed them. The fourth walked with a carefree gait, the collar of his jacket turned up, his hands in his pockets and his head thrown back. Four or five ranks in front was a huge man in a soldier’s winter cap.
Just behind Sofya Levinton was Musya Vinokur, who had celebrated her fourteenth birthday in the goods-wagon.
Death! It had become sociable, quite at home; it called on people without ceremony, coming into their yards and workshops, meeting a housewife at the market and taking her off together with her sack of potatoes, joining in children’s games, peeping into a shop where some tailors were hurrying to finish a coat for the wife of a commissar, waiting in a bread queue, sitting down beside an old woman darning stockings.
Death carried on in its own everyday manner, and people in theirs. Sometimes it allowed them to finish a cigarette or eat up a meal; sometimes it came up on a man with comradely bluffness, slapping him on the back and guffawing stupidly.
It was as though people had now understood death, as though it had at last revealed how humdrum it was, how childishly simple. Really it was an easy crossing, just a shallow stream with planks thrown across from one bank – where there was smoke coming out of the wooden huts – to the other bank and its empty meadows. It was a mere five or six steps. That was all. What was there to be afraid of? A calf was just going over the bridge – you could hear its hooves – and there were some little boys running across in bare feet.
Sofya Levinton listened to the music. She had first heard this piece when she was a child; she had listened to it again as a student, and then as a young doctor. It always filled her with a keen sense of the future.
But this time the music was deceptive. Sofya Levinton had no future, only a past.
For a moment this sense of her past blotted out everything present, blotted out the abyss. It was the very strangest of feelings, something you could never share with any other person – not even your wife, your mother, your brother, your son, your friend or your father. It was the secret of your soul. However passionately it might long to, your soul could never betray this secret. You carry away this sense of your life without having ever shared it with anyone: the miracle of a particular individual whose conscious and unconscious contain everything good and bad, everything funny, sweet, shameful, pitiful, timid, tender, uncertain, that has happened from childhood to old age – fused into the mysterious sense of an individual life.
When the music began, David had wanted to take the matchbox out of his pocket, open it just for a moment – so the chrysalis wouldn’t catch cold – and let it see the musicians. But after a few steps he forgot the people on the bandstand. There was nothing left but the music and the glow in the sky. The sad, powerful melody filled his soul with longing for his mother – a mother who was neither strong nor calm, a mother who was ashamed at having been deserted by her husband. She had made David a calico shirt and the people in the other rooms along the corridor had laughed at him because it had flowers on it and the sleeves weren’t straight. She had been everything to him. He had always relied on her without thinking. But now, perhaps because of the music, he no longer relied on her. He loved her, but she was weak and helpless – jus
t like the people walking beside him now. And the music was quiet and sleepy; it was like the little waves he had seen when he had had a fever, when he had crawled off his burning pillow onto warm, damp sand.
The band howled; it was as though some huge, dried-up throat had started to wail. The dark wall, the wall that had risen out of the water when he was ill, was hanging over him now, filling the whole sky.
Everything that had ever terrified his little heart now became one. The fear aroused by the picture of a little goat who hadn’t noticed the shadow of a wolf between the trunks of the fir-trees, the blue eyes of the dead calves at market, his dead grandmother, Rebekka Bukhman’s suffocated daughter, his first unreasoning terror at night that had made him scream out desperately for his mother. Death was standing there, as huge as the sky, watching while little David walked towards him on his little legs. All around him there was nothing but music, and he couldn’t cling to it or even batter his head against it.
As for the cocoon, it had no wings, no paws, no antennae, no eyes; it just lay there in its little box, stupidly trustful, waiting.
David was a Jew . . .
He was choking and hiccuping. He would have strangled himself if he had been able to. The music stopped. His little feet and dozens of other little feet were hurrying along. He had no thoughts and he was unable to weep or scream. His fingers were wet with sweat; they were squeezing a little box in his pocket, he no longer even remembered what it was. There was nothing except his little feet, walking, hurrying, running.
If the horror that gripped him had lasted only a few more minutes, he would have fallen to the ground, his heart broken.
When the music stopped, Sofya Levinton wiped away her tears and said angrily: ‘Yes, it’s just what that poor man said!’
Then she glanced at the boy’s face; even here, its peculiar expression made it stand out.
‘What is it? What’s the matter with you?’ she shouted, gripping his hand. ‘What is it? What’s the matter? We’re just going to the bathhouse to wash.’
When they had called for the doctors and surgeons, she had remained silent, fighting against some powerful force that she found repugnant.
The machinist’s wife was walking along beside her; in her arms the pathetic little baby, its head too large for its body, was looking around with a calm, thoughtful expression. It was this woman, Deborah, who one night in the goods-wagon had stolen a handful of sugar for her baby. The injured party had been too feeble to do anything, but old Lapidus had stood up for her . . . No one had wanted to sit near him – he was always urinating on the floor.
And now Deborah was walking along beside her, holding her baby in her arms. And the baby, who had cried day and night, was quite silent. The woman’s sad dark eyes stopped one from noticing the hideousness of her dirty face and pale crumpled lips.
‘A madonna!’ thought Sofya Levinton.
Once, about two years before the war, she had watched the sun as it rose behind the pine-trees on Tyan-Shan, catching the white squirrels in its light; the lake lay there in the dawn as though it had been chiselled out of some pure blue condensed to the solidity of stone. She had thought then that there was probably no one in the world who wouldn’t envy her; and at the same moment, with an intensity that burnt her fifty-year-old heart, she had felt ready to give up everything if only in some shabby, dark, low-ceilinged room she could be hugged by the arms of a child.
She had always loved children, but little David evoked some special tenderness in her that she had never felt before. In the goods-wagon she had given him some bread and he had turned his little face towards her in the half-light; she had wanted to weep, to hug him, to smother him with kisses like a mother kissing her child. In a whisper that no one else could hear, she had said:
‘Eat, my son, eat.’
She seldom spoke to the boy; some strange shame made her want to hide the maternal feelings welling up inside her. But she had noticed that he always watched anxiously if she moved to the other side of the wagon and that he calmed down when she was near him.
She didn’t want to admit why she hadn’t answered when they had called for doctors and surgeons, why she had been seized at that moment by a feeling of exaltation.
The column moved on beside the barbed wire and the ditches, past the reinforced concrete towers with their machine-guns; to these people, who no longer remembered freedom, it seemed that the barbed wire and the machine-gunes were there not to stop the inmates from escaping, but to stop the condemned from hiding away in the camp.
The path turned away from the barbed wire and led towards some low squat buildings with flat roofs; from a distance, these rectangles with grey windowless walls looked like the children’s bricks David had once glued together to make pictures.
As the column turned, a gap appeared in the ranks and David saw that some of the buildings had their doors flung wide open. Not knowing why, he took the little box out of his pocket and, without saying goodbye to the chrysalis, flung it away. Let it live!
‘Splendid people, these Germans!’ said the man in front – as though the guards might hear and appreciate his flattery.
The man with the raised collar shrugged his shoulders in a manner that was somehow peculiar, gave a quick glance to either side of him and seemed to grow taller and more imposing; with a sudden nimble jump, as though he had spread his wings, he punched an SS guard in the face and knocked him to the ground. Sofya Levinton leapt after him with an angry shout. She stumbled and fell. Several hands grabbed her and helped her up. The people behind were pressing on; David glanced round, afraid of being knocked over, and caught a glimpse of the man being dragged away by the guards.
In the brief instant when Sofya had attempted to attack the guard, she had forgotten about David. Now once more she took him by the hand. David saw how clear, fierce and splendid human eyes can be when – even for a fraction of a second – they sense freedom.
By now the front ranks had already reached the asphalt square in front of the bath-house; their steps sounded different as they marched through the wide-open doors.
Footnotes
fn1 Dentist.
47
The warm, damp changing-room was quiet and gloomy; the only light came through some small rectangular windows.
Benches made from thick bare planks disappeared into the half-darkness. A low partition ran down the middle of the room to the wall opposite the entrance; the men were undressing on one side, the women and children on the other.
This division didn’t cause any anxiety: people were still able to see each other and call out: ‘Manya, Manya, are you there?’ ‘Yes, yes, I can see you.’ One man shouted out: ‘Matilda, bring a flannel so you can rub my back for me!’ Most people felt a sense of relief.
Serious-looking men in gowns walked up and down the rows, keeping order and giving out sensible advice: socks, foot-cloths and stockings should be placed inside your shoes, and you mustn’t forget the number of your row and place.
People’s voices sounded quiet and muffled.
When a man has no clothes on, he draws closer to himself. ‘God, the hairs on my chest are thicker and wirier than ever – and what a lot of grey!’ ‘How ugly my fingernails look!’ There’s only one thing a naked man can say as he looks at himself: ‘Yes, here I am. This is me!’ He recognizes himself and identifies his ‘I’, an ‘I’ that remains always the same. A little boy crosses his skinny arms over his bony chest, looks at his frog-like body and says, ‘This is me’; fifty years later he looks at a plump, flabby chest, at the blue, knotted veins on his legs and says, ‘This is me’.
But Sofya Levinton noticed something else. It was as though the body of a whole people, previously covered over by layers of rags, was laid bare in these naked bodies of all ages: the skinny little boy with the big nose over whom an old woman had shaken her head and said, ‘Poor little Hassid!’; the fourteen-year-old girl who was admired even here by hundreds of eyes; the feeble and deformed old men and women who
aroused everyone’s pitying respect; men with strong backs covered in hair; women with large breasts and prominently veined legs. It was as though she felt, not just about herself, but about her whole people: ‘Yes, here I am.’ This was the naked body of a people: young and old, robust and feeble, with bright curly hair and with pale grey hair.
Sofya looked at her own broad, white shoulders; no one had ever kissed them – only her mother, long ago when she was a child. Then, with a feeling of meekness, she looked at David. Had she really, only a few minutes ago, forgotten about him and leapt furiously at an SS guard? ‘A foolish young Jew and an old Russian pupil of his once preached the doctrine of non-violence,’ she thought. ‘But that was before Fascism.’ No longer ashamed of the maternal feelings that had been aroused in her – virgin though she was – she bent down and took David’s narrow little face in her large hands. It was as though she had taken his warm eyes into her hands and kissed them.
‘Yes, my child,’ she said, ‘we’ve reached the bath-house.’
For a moment, in the gloom of the concrete changing-room, she glimpsed the eyes of Alexandra Vladimirovna Shaposhnikova. Was she still alive? They had said goodbye. Sofya had gone on her way, and now reached the end of it; so had Anya Shtrum.
The machinist’s wife wanted to show her little son to her husband, but he was on the other side of the partition. Instead she held him out, half-covered in diapers, to Sofya Levinton and said proudly: ‘He’s only just been undressed and he’s already stopped crying.’
Behind the partition, a man with a thick black beard, wearing torn pyjama bottoms instead of underpants, called out, his eyes and his false teeth glittering, ‘Manechka, there’s a bathing-costume for sale here. Shell we buy it?’
Life and Fate Page 66