“I understand you, I’ll remember it,” I said, “but what was in the package?”
“How should I know,” said the rabbi, “if you don’t know? Because you’re dreaming of me, not me of you!”
I was awakened by a powerful roar, thick and dense as a carpet that covered the top of the clouds. The Anglo-American air fortresses were flying over again….
THREE
They, the fortresses, had recently been flying over us almost every cloudy night. Then the bright spots of the searchlights crawled through the clouds, meeting each other, overlapping each other and crossing each other, drifting apart, while beyond the forest, over in Brandenburg, began the sewing machine clatter of antiaircraft fire. The lit-up shells stitched the sky with wide seams, but the invincible airplanes passed through the skies like cows pregnant with bombs, which some pitiful mosquitoes were trying to divert from the goal. The cows gave birth somewhere far away, then, relieved, came back by the same route and again with the searchlights and the sewing machines and the glowing seams that stitched the clouds and the sky, until a full and tired silence settled in.
During such cloudy nights, long before the airplanes buzzed in the dark, somewhere far away, anxious sirens would begin to howl and minutes after that the lights in the camp would go out. Then would occur the wondrous transformation of Oberlieutenant Immanuel-Johannes Brückner from commandant of Special Site A-17 into tender lover, I would even say a priest in the temple of Eros. At such times, he would sit on his bicycle, his electric headlight dutifully dimmed according to orders, with just a thin bright thread of light that reminded one of the eye of a winking Chinese and that, with its trembling beam, marked out the route to the gate and from there to the woods. Beyond the forest, somewhere in the plain, was the village, which I never got to see, temporarily inhabited by his Berlin lady love. And I, camp inmate Heinrich Bjegalski, former doorman at the Lvov ophthalmology clinic and currently manager of the private office of the oberlieutenant, was using a roll of black paper to darken the windows and switching on the gas lamps in order to read another chapter from some novel, with which the aforementioned private office was well equipped. Such an act of solidarity with my boss was my strict post at the telephone so that if someone from the city management called, for whatever reason, for example to check on our military preparedness, I would politely inform him of my name and position, and also that Herr Oberlieutenant was somewhere in the camp surveying the premises, can I take a message, sir, and other similar maneuvers for deceiving the enemy. The Radish would come back before dawn puffing like crazy from the arduous effort of biking up the hill, but happy and exhausted, and for my nocturnal vigilance would give me one reichsmark. And one reichsmark was something significant for a camp inmate, who was going to be paid after the end of the war, after expenses were deducted for delousing and so on, and with it you could still buy from the kiosk a lot of things produced in the most ingenious ways just from soybeans—salami, coffee, chocolate, or, for example, onion bread, with just the onions being authentic.
And so life flowed along with the alternation of clear moonlit nights, which condemned me to days without soy salami and onion bread, and the darkness of winter clouds hanging over my hours of vigilance by the phone, while the Anglo-Americans and the oberlieutenant tended to business.
Everything would have gone on like this, if life, in principle prone to surprising vignettes and caprioles, hadn’t decided otherwise: one night, in the silence between two cannonades, when the airplanes had passed by and hadn’t yet returned, and I was reading by the rickety light of the gas lamp something from the Dresden Indian Karl May, the door opened and a raging blonde valkyrie, of the plumper kind, stormed into the office.
“Where is he?!” angrily asked this, let’s call her Brunhilde for now, waving her hand behind her back at the post guard, who had brought her and obediently closed the door and remained outside—a fact that partially demystified the identity of the lady.
I dutifully stood up, the way a gentleman does in front of a lady, even more so when the gentleman is a camp inmate, and the lady German. “Whom do you mean, dear madam?” I asked.
“Don’t act dumb! I’m asking about Oberlieutenant Brückner!”
“He,” I mumbled, “I mean Oberlieutenenant Brückner, at the moment, as you see…is somewhere around the site, so to say.”
“Listen, are you a fool, or are you making a fool out of me? He’s in the village with his mistress, and you’re covering for him! I know everything, everything’s been reported to me!”
“I’m sorry, but with what right—” I began heroically, but she interrupted me nervously: “With the right of a lawful wife!”
Uh-oh, what now—when I hadn’t even been warned about this kind of situation?
She sat down and started drumming with her long polished nails on the table. “Her address!” she ordered unexpectedly. “Her exact address in the village, or I will tear your head off! I will send you to Buchenwald, if you know what that means!”
I knew what it meant; the glory of that picturesque little place near Weimar had reached us here too. I must have been very sincere when I told her I didn’t know the address, dear Frau Brückner, nor did I know the aforementioned lady from the village, nor anything about this matter, because she believed me for the first time, and asked for a cigarette. I always had cigarettes, stolen from the boss, even though I wasn’t a smoker—there was always some inmate who would beg for a smoke.
“I’ll wait for him here,” she said decisively, elegantly lighting up her cigarette and waving the smoke away with her hand as if she were the number-one competitor of Marlene Dietrich. The nicotine apparently lowered the adrenaline in her blood; she calmed down and looked at me with curiosity, while I stood straight, as was due. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Bjegalski. Heinrich Bjegalski, madam.”
She looked at me from feet to head, in which I read a slight contempt. “The Poles,” she said, “usually are handsome men.”
I shrugged my shoulders apologetically: “There are occasional exceptions.”
She again started drumming with her nails on the table, then unexpectedly asked, “Where’s the schnapps?”
“What do you mean, dear madam?”
“Listen, I told you, don’t play the fool! Or do you think I don’t know how you guzzle it down every night with that randy mongrel, my husband. So, where is it?”
I was resolved to die on the scaffold if I had to, but not to betray my benefactor—a heroic but futile decision, because the valkyrie caught my unintentional look and opened the cupboard under the files, where sitting unawares there were three bottles— one already opened, the others untouched and virgin—and our two small glasses, respectively, engraved with such dear memories.
The lady silently filled up the glasses, drank one bottoms up, and then in a commanding fashion pointed with her exquisite finger to the other one. “You drink too!”
I drank, I had no other choice—I was a prisoner, and she was a German. Then she poured again and I drank again. I’ve already told you that I’m easy prey to King Alcohol, that’s a novel in itself, and, in no time, my eyes were shining bright and I felt a strange and luscious weakness. The woman stood up and briefly, for no reason at all, laughed a throaty laugh, in which there sounded notes whose millions-of-years-old sacred and encoded meaning could only be misunderstood by a real idiot.
“Come!” she commanded, with an almost tender insistence.
I didn’t dare obey until I had looked behind my back, in order to make sure that the order was not meant for someone else. But there was nothing behind me, except for the portrait of the Führer and in this specific historic moment, he was hardly the one destined to become the instrument of female revenge.
O Lord God, life surprises you with all kinds of strangeness! I was faithful to Sarah, I swear, but if I have to be honest, I will add that I h
ad probably been faithful because of the lack of an occasion, which would confirm or deny the above-mentioned claim. For such situations in life, I would advise you not to believe the one who swears that he would never in the world touch lobster with tartar sauce, if you’re not convinced in advance that such a thing had even been offered to him.
I knew that what was about to happen and what was as unavoidable as the Law of Gravity was impermissible and sinful, and that I was pushed to it by dark satanic forces, but I hope you’ll be forbearing toward a generally normal man, even from a certain point of view a virtuous nebbish, who hadn’t seen a woman’s skirt since biblical times. You’ll understand him and forgive his original sin!
In short, I myself didn’t realize how I found myself with the blonde valkyrie on top of that iron bed, which was the greatest generosity I ever received from Lieutenant Brückner. Now that I’d also been awarded the privilege of consoling his wife, I was obediently grateful for the honor.
I am by nature a shy person, so let’s skip the details, in order to come to the moment when Brunhilde put herself together, restored the thick layer of lipstick to her lips, and while smoking her second cigarette, looked at me intently again.
“Strange,” she said. “For me the Poles are really handsome men, but I’ve always considered them a little feeble in that department. Now I found out that you’re also quite gifted!”
In my soul I gave thanks on behalf of the Republic of Poland and its immortal symbol Joseph Pilsudski.
FOUR
Since that night no one has ever felt greater and more tender affection for the Anglo-American bombers than I, because the story would repeat itself like a musical phrase from a broken gramophone record: after the air-raid alarm and the corresponding switching off of the electric lights, the nibelung would go to his mistress and for this pay me one reichsmark; minutes later his Brunhilde would show up on her bicycle and later would also give me one reichsmark. From the point of view of commercial ethics, on which we really insisted in Kolodetz, this was a fair business transaction in which everyone was on the winning side and no one on the losing.
A similar transaction was offered to the banker Abraham Rosenbaum by our Mendel: “Mr. Rosenbaum,” said Mendel, “we can engage in a wonderful racket, in which each one of us will make three hundred thousand rubles!”
“Interesting. And what’s the racket?”
“I learned that you are giving six hundred thousand for your daughter’s dowry.”
“So?”
“Well, I’m ready to take her for half the price!”
So much for mutually beneficial transactions. As to my two honestly earned reichsmarks for every Anglo-American bomb attack, tell me, please, in which camp was what Jew ever better off during the Second World War?
But every beginning has an end too, as my mother Rebekha Blumenfeld used to say. And most often, the good beginning, unfortunately, as my mother also used to say, doesn’t necessarily mean a good ending. And the bad ending began with that one morning after the military check, when four civilians in long leather coats came pouring out of two military “Steyrs,” and quickly ascended the few wooden steps to the office. It was an icy February—that same February when the most frequently mentioned geographic locations in the world were the Volga and Stalingrad. I was diligently standing erect in the corner in my gray duck clothes; the civilians threw a quick glance at me and after an exchange of whispers with the Radish, who became visibly pale, went out.
A little after that three people were arrested—the senior-master Stakhovich and two Russians. I was freezing outside, on the small veranda in front of the office, when they were taking the arrested men away. The limping Stakhovich cast an indifferent glance at me, as if he had never seen me before, and then crouched down in order to place his large body inside the car.
Much later, from sketchy remarks of Oberlieutenant Brückner, who was feeling disgraced and discredited in front of the whole Reich—from the Atlantic, as he would put it, to the Russian steppes—I could form a picture of what had happened. And what had happened was something incredible: in the strictly secret and not less strictly guarded Special Site A-17, it turns out, a secret radio transmitter had been operating, and maintaining regular contact with Berlin—not of course with Wehrmacht headquarters, but with other headquarters, you know what I mean. This equipment, in the form of a small wooden tool case and its electronic contents, had been home-produced by Stakhovich with the golden hands and hidden in the coke heaps of the blacksmith’s workshop. After a few months of successful operations, however, it was detected by the new German contraption called “Peilgerät,” which with ingenious precision spotted its location too, and the rest you know. What my completely humiliated boss Brückner couldn’t understand was the way in which the parts, the lamps, and the miscellaneous condensers and resistors had been delivered to the camp. As far as the Resistance was concerned, not in the electric but in the political sense of the word, I was partially up-to-date on a certain small package, handed to me by the German locomotive machinist, and the thought of it froze the blood in my veins. Because if the fellows who’d been arrested were to talk, I thought to myself, it was all over with me, and at the hands of the Gestapo, without any doubt, I’d shit my pants.
Soon after that, during one of my sleepless and fearful nights, I was again visited by Rabbi Ben-David.
“Are you scared?” he asked.
“I am,” I admitted.
“I don’t doubt it, but let’s hope they won’t say anything. And that you won’t be arrested, and thus miss your only chance in life to become a hero. Don’t worry, you wouldn’t talk to the Gestapo anyway, not because you’re strong but because you’ve got nothing to tell them. The machinist doesn’t appear on the ramp anymore, does he? I hope he took off in time, so you can’t tell on him either. Sleep calmly.”
“Was it worth it,” I said, “for three people to sacrifice themselves for something of doubtful benefit, that won’t even scratch the paint of one of their tanks and will in no way determine the outcome of the war?”
“Who lied to you,” said the rabbi, “that it won’t determine the outcome? This small tool case is the overcoming of fear, a protest against submission to slavery, an act of resistance against the temptations of conformism. These chaps who got arrested, or the German machinist, aren’t they planters of faith that the light has not gone out forever and that the men of Europe have not disappeared?”
“I know I’m weak and I’m ready to pay for it,” I said, “but aren’t they sowers of wind, because what’s a pitiful handmade radio transmitter, buried in the blacksmith’s coke heaps, in comparison to the might of their armies?”
“Shall I tell you what it is? It is the stubbornness of the slave and a challenge to inhuman shooting steel. I will tell you: it’s nothing and everything—a finger to the Führer, but also an example, which the weak fellow needs, in order to believe the world can be changed. Then it will gain new meaning and then what’s written on the gates of the concentration camps will come true: ‘TO EACH HIS OWN!’ Amen and Gut Shabbos, Itzik!”
It seemed to me that I didn’t close my eyes all night, but I was awakened by the merciless sound of the piece of railroad track that announced the birth of another camp day.
FIVE
One law of nature, confirmed by science, as well as by clairvoyants, says that general awfulness has no day off. Or to put it in other words, when something bad happens to you, you can be sure it doesn’t come alone, and that after it others will follow along like ducklings after their mother. In our case, it seems that no minor role was played by the collapse of our “Special Site’s” prestige as something that had firmly supported the doctrine of the strictly guarded secret as a major element in national security. The situation was also influenced by a solitary bomb, dropped by an absentminded American, whether by accident or on purpose we don’t know, that fell about twenty meters or
so from the machinists’ workshop, broke the windows of the surrounding barracks and, as a final strategic-military effect, made a hole in the sea. But the respective institutions also saw in this bomb evil premonitions and treason, which imperatively required that we purge our collective of poisonous weeds.
This is how we came to the lining up of the ethnic Poles—almost half the camp personnel—at the square in front of the commandant’s, while the other—the Soviet half—remained in the workshops to maintain production. And as far as I was, at least on paper, a pure-blooded Pole, I found myself among those lined-up, and to my surprise, even Oberlieutenant Brückner didn’t know the meaning and purpose of the telephone-transmitted order.
And so, we were standing in the square, with the Radish on the small wooden veranda in front of the office, as if he were going to receive a victory parade. He frequently looked at his watch, himself anxious by the delay of the parade, though pretending to be well informed and highly confident by asking strictly from time to time for silence. Of course, the gossip information agency, the one that every well-equipped camp possesses as well as the whispers crawling between the lines, had immediately set itself in motion and been informing interested parties that we would probably be released, a reward for labor honestly dedicated to the Reich.
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