Musya Borisovna smiled at the joke; her low-cut shift revealed her breasts and she was covering them with one hand.
Sofya Levinton knew that these witticisms were anything but an expression of strength. It was just that terror became less terrible if you laughed at it.
Rebekka Bukhman’s beautiful face looked thin and exhausted; she turned her huge, feverish eyes aside and ran her fingers through her thick curls, hiding away her rings and ear-rings.
She was in the grip of a cruel, blind life-force. Helpless and unhappy though she was, Fascism had reduced her to its own level: nothing could break her determination to survive. Even now she no longer remembered how, with these same hands, she had squeezed her child’s throat, afraid that its crying would reveal their hiding-place.
But as Rebekka Bukhman gave a long sigh, like an animal that had finally reached the safety of a thicket, she caught sight of a woman in a gown cutting Musya Borisovna’s curls with a pair of scissors. Beside her someone else was cutting a little girl’s hair. A silky black stream fell silently onto the concrete floor. There was hair everywhere; it was as though the women were washing their legs in streams of bright and dark water.
The woman in the gown unhurriedly took Rebekka’s hand away and seized the hair at the back of her head; the tips of her scissors clinked against the rings. Without stopping work, she deftly ran her fingers through Rebekka’s hair, removed the rings and whispered: ‘Everything will be returned to you.’ Then, still more quietly, she whispered: ‘Ganz ruhig. The Germans are listening.’
Rebekka at once forgot the woman’s face; she had no eyes, no lips, just a blue-veined, yellowish hand.
A grey-haired man appeared on the other side of the partition; his spectacles sat askew on his crooked nose and he looked like a sick, unhappy demon. He glanced up and down the benches. Articulating each syllable like someone used to speaking to the deaf, he asked:
‘Mother, mother, how are you?’
A little wrinkled old woman, recognizing her son’s voice amid the general hubbub, guessed what he meant and answered:
‘My pulse is fine, no irregularity at all, don’t worry!’
Someone next to Sofya Levinton said:
‘That’s Helman. He’s a famous doctor.’
A naked young woman was holding a thick-lipped little girl in white knickers by the hand and screaming:
‘They’re going to kill us, they’re going to kill us!’
‘Quiet, quiet! Calm her down, she’s mad,’ said the other women. They looked round – there were no guards in sight. Their eyes and ears were able to rest in the quiet semi-darkness. What pleasure there was, a pleasure they hadn’t experienced for months on end, in taking off their half-rotten socks, stockings and foot-cloths, in being free of clothes that had become almost wooden with dirt and sweat. The haircutters finished their job and went away; the women breathed still more freely. Some began to doze, others checked the seams on their clothes for lice, still others started to chat quietly among themselves.
‘A pity we haven’t got a pack of cards!’ said one voice. ‘We could play Fool.’
At this moment Kaltluft, a cigar between his teeth, was picking up the telephone receiver; the storeman was loading a motor-cart with jars of ‘Zyklon B’ that had red labels on them like pots of jam; and the special unit orderly was sitting in the office, waiting for the red indicator lamp on the wall to light up.
Suddenly the order ‘Stand up!’ came from each end of the changing-room.
Germans in black uniforms were standing at the end of the benches. Everyone made their way into a wide corridor, lit by dim ceiling-lamps covered by ovals of thick glass. The muscular strength of the smoothly curving concrete sucked in the stream of people. It was quiet; the only sound was the rustle of bare feet.
Before the war Sofya Levinton had once said to Yevgenia Nikolaevna Shaposhnikova, ‘If one man is fated to be killed by another, it would be interesting to trace the gradual convergence of their paths. At the start they might be miles away from one another – I might be in Pamir picking alpine roses and clicking my camera, while this other man, my death, might be eight thousand miles away, fishing for ruff in a little stream after school. I might be getting ready to go to a concert and he might be at the railway station buying a ticket to go and visit his mother-in-law – and yet eventually we are bound to meet, we can’t avoid it . . .’
Sofya looked up at the ceiling: the thick concrete would never again allow her to listen to a storm or glimpse the overturned dipper of the Great Bear . . . She was walking in bare feet towards a bend in the corridor, and the corridor was noiselessly, stealthily floating towards her. The movement went on by itself, without violence; it was as if she were gliding along in a dream, as if everything inside her and round her had been smeared with glycerine . . .
The door to the gas chamber opened gradually and yet suddenly. The stream of people flowed through. An old couple, who had lived together for fifty years and had been separated in the changing-room, were again walking side by side; the machinist’s wife was carrying her baby, now awake; a mother and son looked over everyone’s heads, scrutinizing not space but time. Sofya Levinton caught a glimpse of the doctor’s face; right beside her she saw Musya Borisovna’s kind eyes, then the horror-filled gaze of Rebekka Bukhman. There was Lusya Shterental – nothing could lessen the beauty of her young eyes, her nose, her neck, her half-open mouth; and there was old Lapidus walking beside her with his wrinkled blue lips. Again, Sofya Levinton hugged David’s shoulders. Never before had she felt such tenderness for people.
Rebekka Bukhman, now walking at Sofya’s side, gave a sudden scream – the scream of someone who is being turned into ashes.
A man with a length of hosepipe was standing beside the entrance to the gas chamber. He wore a brown shirt with a zip-fastener and short sleeves. It was seeing his childish, mindless, drunken smile that had caused Rebekka Bukhman to let out that terrible scream.
His eyes slid over Sofya Levinton’s face. There he was; they had met at last!
Sofya felt her fingers itching to seize hold of the neck that seemed to creep up from his open collar. The man with the smile raised his club. Through the ringing of bells and the crunch of broken glass in her head, she heard the words: ‘Easy now, you filthy Yid!’
She just managed to stay on her feet. With slow, heavy steps, still holding David, she crossed the steel threshold.
48
David passed his hand over the steel frame of the door; it felt cool and slippery. He caught sight of a light-grey blur that was the reflection of his own face. The soles of his bare feet told him that the floor here was colder than in the corridor – it must have just been washed.
Taking short, slow steps, he walked into a concrete box with a low ceiling. He couldn’t see any lamps but there was a grey light in the chamber, a stone-like light that seemed unfit for living beings – it was as though the sun were shining through a concrete sky.
People who had always stayed together now drifted apart, began to lose one another. David glimpsed the face of Lusya Shterental. When he had first seen it in the goods-wagon he had felt the sweet sadness of being in love. A moment later a short woman with no neck was standing where Lusya had been. She was replaced by an old man with blue eyes and white fluff on his neck, then by a young man with a fixed wide-eyed stare.
This wasn’t how people moved. It wasn’t even how the lowest form of animal life moved. It was a movement without sense or purpose, with no trace of a living will behind it. The stream of people flowed into the chamber; the people going in pushed the people already inside, the latter pushed their neighbours, and all these countless shoves and pushes with elbows, shoulders and stomachs gave rise to a form of movement identical in every respect to the streaming of molecules.
David had the impression that someone was leading him, that he had to move. He reached the wall; first one knee; then his chest, came up against its bare cold. He couldn’t go any further. Sofya Levin
ton was already there, leaning against the wall.
For a few moments they watched the people moving away from the door. The door seemed very far away; you could guess its position by the particular density of the white human bodies; they squeezed through the entrance and were then allowed to spread out into the chamber.
David saw people’s faces. Since the train had been unloaded that morning he had only seen people’s backs; now it was as though the faces of the whole trainload were moving towards him. Sofya Levinton had suddenly become strange; her voice sounded different in this flat concrete world; she had changed since entering the gas chamber. When she said, ‘Hold on to my hand, son,’ he could feel that she was afraid of letting him go, afraid of being left alone. They didn’t manage to stay by the wall; they were pushed away from it and forced to shuffle forward. David felt he was moving faster than Sofya Levinton. Her hand was gripping his, pulling him towards her. But some gentle, imperceptibly growing force was pulling David away; Sofya Levinton’s grip began to loosen.
The crowd grew steadily denser; people began to move more and more slowly, their steps shorter and shorter. No one was controlling the movement of people in the concrete box. The Germans didn’t care whether the people in the chamber stood still or moved in senseless zigzags and half-circles. The naked boy went on taking tiny, senseless steps. The curve traced by his slight body no longer coincided with the curve traced by Sofya Levinton’s large heavy body; they were being pulled apart. She shouldn’t have held him by the hand; they should have been like those two women – mother and daughter – clasping each other convulsively, with all the melancholy obstinacy of love, cheek to cheek and breast to breast, fusing into one indivisible body.
Now there were even more people, packed in so tightly they no longer obeyed the laws of molecular movement. The boy screamed as he lost hold of Sofya Levinton’s hand. But immediately Sofya Levinton receded into the past. Nothing existed except the present moment. Beside him, mouths were breathing, bodies were touching each other, people’s thoughts and feelings fusing together.
David had been caught by a sub-current which, thrown back by the wall, was now flowing towards the door. He glimpsed three people joined together: two men and an old woman – she was defending her children, they were supporting their mother. Suddenly a new, quite different movement arose beside David. The noise was new too, quite distinct from the general shuffling and muttering.
‘Let me through!’ A man with strong muscular arms, head bent forward over a thick neck, was forcing his way through the solid mass of bodies. He wanted to escape the hypnotic concrete rhythm; his body was rebelling, blindly, thoughtlessly, like the body of a fish on a kitchen table. Soon he became quiet again, choking, taking tiny steps like everyone else.
This disruption changed people’s trajectories; David found himself beside Sofya Levinton again. She clasped the boy to her with the peculiar strength familiar to the Germans who worked there – when they emptied the chamber, they never attempted to separate bodies locked in a close embrace.
There were screams from near the entrance; seeing the dense human mass inside, people were refusing to go through the door.
David watched the door close: gently, smoothly, as though drawn by a magnet, the steel door drew closer to its steel frame. Finally they became one.
High up, behind a rectangular metal grating in the wall, David saw something stir. It looked like a grey rat, but he realized it was a fan beginning to turn. He sensed a faint, rather sweet smell.
The shuffling quietened down; all you could hear were occasional screams, groans and barely audible words. Speech was no longer of any use to people, nor was action; action is directed towards the future and there no longer was any future. When David moved his head and neck, it didn’t make Sofya Levinton want to turn and see what he was looking at.
Her eyes – which had read Homer, Izvestia, Huckleberry Finn and Mayne Reid, that had looked at good people and bad people, that had seen the geese in the green meadows of Kursk, the stars above the observatory at Pulkovo, the glitter of surgical steel, the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, tomatoes and turnips in the bins at market, the blue water of Issyk-Kul – her eyes were no longer of any use to her. If someone had blinded her, she would have felt no sense of loss.
She was still breathing, but breathing was hard work and she was running out of strength. The bells ringing in her head became deafening; she wanted to concentrate on one last thought, but was unable to articulate this thought. She stood there – mute, blind, her eyes still open.
The boy’s movements filled her with pity. Her feelings towards him were so simple that she no longer needed words and eyes. The half-dead boy was still breathing, but the air he took in only drove life away. His head was turning from side to side; he still wanted to see. He could see people settling onto the ground; he could see mouths that were toothless and mouths with white teeth and gold teeth; he could see a thin stream of blood flowing from a nostril. He could see eyes peering through the glass; Roze’s inquisitive eyes had momentarily met David’s. He still needed his voice – he would have asked Aunt Sonya about those wolf-like eyes. He still even needed thought. He had taken only a few steps in the world. He had seen the prints of children’s bare heels on hot, dusty earth, his mother lived in Moscow, the moon looked down and people’s eyes looked up at it from below, a teapot was boiling on the gas-ring . . . This world, where a chicken could run without its head, where there was milk in the morning and frogs he could get to dance by holding their front feet – this world still preoccupied him.
All this time David was being clasped by strong warm hands. He didn’t feel his eyes go dark, his heart become empty, his mind grow dull and blind. He had been killed; he no longer existed.
Sofya Levinton felt the boy’s body subside in her arms. Once again she had fallen behind him. In mine-shafts where the air becomes poisoned, it is always the little creatures, the birds and mice, that die first. This boy, with his slight, bird-like body, had left before her.
‘I’ve become a mother,’ she thought.
That was her last thought.
Her heart, however, still had life in it: it contracted, ached and felt pity for all of you, both living and dead; Sofya Osipovna felt a wave of nausea. She pressed David, now a doll, to herself; she became dead, a doll.
49
When a person dies, they cross over from the realm of freedom to the realm of slavery. Life is freedom, and dying is a gradual denial of freedom. Consciousness first weakens and then disappears. The life-processes – respiration, the metabolism, the circulation – continue for some time, but an irrevocable move has been made towards slavery; consciousness, the flame of freedom, has died out.
The stars have disappeared from the night sky; the Milky Way has vanished; the sun has gone out; Venus, Mars and Jupiter have been extinguished; millions of leaves have died; the wind and the oceans have faded away; flowers have lost their colour and fragrance; bread has vanished; water has vanished; even the air itself, the sometimes cool, sometimes sultry air, has vanished. The universe inside a person has ceased to exist. This universe is astonishingly similar to the universe that exists outside people. It is astonishingly similar to the universes still reflected within the skulls of millions of living people. But still more astonishing is the fact that this universe had something in it that distinguished the sound of its ocean, the smell of its flowers, the rustle of its leaves, the hues of its granite and the sadness of its autumn fields both from those of every other universe that exists and ever has existed within people, and from those of the universe that exists eternally outside people. What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone’s consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others wh
at they have already found in themselves.
50
Semyonov, an army driver, was taken prisoner at the same time as Mostovskoy and Sofya Levinton. After ten weeks in a camp near the front, he was sent with a large party of captured Red Army soldiers in the direction of the western border. During these ten weeks he wasn’t beaten or kicked with fists, rifle-butts or boots; all he suffered from was hunger.
Like water, hunger is part of life. Like water, it has the power to destroy the body, to cripple the soul, to annihilate millions of lives.
Hunger, ice, snowfalls, droughts, floods and epidemics can decimate flocks of sheep and herds of horses. They can kill wolves, foxes, song-birds, camels, perch and vipers. During natural disasters, people become like animals in their suffering.
The State has the power to dam life up. Like water squeezed between narrow banks, hunger will then cripple, smash to pieces or exterminate a man, tribe or people.
Molecule by molecule, hunger squeezes out the fats and proteins from each cell. Hunger softens the bones, twists the legs of children with rickets, thins the blood, stiffens the muscles, makes the head spin, gnaws at the nerves. Hunger weighs down the soul, drives away joy and faith, destroys thought and engenders submissiveness, base cruelty, indifference and despair.
All that is human in a man can perish. He can turn into a savage animal that murders, commits acts of cannibalism and eats corpses.
The State can construct a barrier that separates wheat and rye from the people who sowed it. The State has the power to bring about a famine as terrible as those which killed millions of people during the siege of Leningrad and in the cattle-pens of Hitler’s camps.
Food! Victuals! Grub! Nourishment! Rations! Hard tack! Bread! A fry-up! Something to eat! A rich diet! A meat diet! An invalid diet! A thin diet! A rich, generous spread! A refined dish! Something simple! A peasant dish! A blow-out! Food! Food . . .!
Life and Fate Page 67