Europa Blues

19

12 February 1945

At long last, I have managed to get hold of some paper and a pencil. I shan’t waste time and energy explaining how; I have much too little of either of those to spare. My time is running out, my strength ebbing away. I can feel it, I know it. It will soon be my turn. I have seen the list. I have seen my name on the list. Leonard Sheinkman, it said. Me. It seems only fair to be clear about that from the beginning. To avoid any misunderstandings.

This may be the very last thing I write in this life and I don’t want to waste it on petty details. I have done more than enough of that.

I truly wish it were possible to describe love. I am an author, describing is what I do, and yet I cannot do it. Well then, who can? Perhaps it is only possible afterwards, once it is all too late.

If that is true, it should be possible now.

My son…

No. Not today. Today won’t do.

Today I will simply have to make do with the pleasure of once more feeling the weight of a pencil in my hand, once more being able to caress the smooth paper beneath it.

Once upon a time, writing was what made me live. Will it simply be the memory of this I experience when pencil meets paper, or will I live again? One last flourish?

13 February 1945

It is so strange to see time. It is outside the window. My friends here, they are distant. They aren’t friends, they are fellows in misfortune – the type of man best avoided, since they simply reflect yourself. Do I look the way they look? I am thirty-three years old and I probably look like an old corpse. There are men much younger than me here and they look older than the image I have of myself. I hope to be able to retain that image until I die.

That should be possible; it won’t be far off.

I see time. One might think it is nothing but a black clock tower, something physical, a timepiece with a complex mechanical motion, a tower constructed to keep the ravages of time in check. Each second is the tower’s triumph; each second of the ageing which has gone on century after century, marked by the mechanical precision of the clock. But that isn’t what I see. What I see is time.

I cannot explain it, and yet I must try. Why else would this pencil be resting in my hand, why else would all this effort have gone towards placing time here, right here, at the point of pencil meeting paper?

What I can see is time. That is where I must begin. My time, and how time changed when I met Magda and walked hand in hand with her, at home in Berlin. Our Tiergarten… So calm and tranquil. Prior to that, I had been a suffering author. I had suffered from loneliness. But suddenly, I became a productive author. A productive man. I believe I produced something of a real life, too. A home. A life shared. A little bit of happiness. She read the words I wrote; she was my best reader. Then along came the baby. Our son. Miracles impossible to describe. Each movement was a miracle. The soft movements of those chubby little arms. The turn of a head. Those dark eyes, pupils shrinking and expanding. Everything was a miracle.

And that was time.

I can see it again now. Is it still a miracle? Can it still, ticking away so mechanically up there on the hexagonal black tower, send me the peace the miracle deserves? It can, for a moment – a short, short moment when pencil meets paper. But I can also feel the iciness descending the moment I lift the pencil. The spaces between words are blocks of ice. The words are freezing fast in them.

With their wounded heads, the men pace the corridors like corpses and I think: Do you see time too, people? Are you also able to see time for a brief, brief moment? How do you do it?

I myself have no method.

The text is fading now. The ice is spreading over the letters, freezing pencil to paper like a tongue to metal, and I wonder: Why did you die away from me? Why wasn’t I the one to die away from you? My brain will be frozen solid. That is my only comfort and my sole, minuscule trace of resistance.

Dying.

14 February 1945

New day. I have seen the list again. The icy wind swept in through the window from the square, making the sheet flutter in through the barred door and come to rest by my bare feet.

Yet another toe will have to go, I think. The middle toe on my left foot is as black as the hexagonal tower which taunts me out there with its indifferent ticking. I don’t hear it, but I see it. I see it constantly, unceasingly.

The list was lying there by my blackened toe, and I saw that my name had climbed higher. I welcomed it as a gift. A gift from the icy wind. Soon you will wrap the clock tower in your ice and your time, and then even the time moving through its mechanisms and the time being cast out in its ironic, rejoicing bells, even that time will be swept up in your ice, ice wind, and all time will cease. Each of us will move through a frozen existence, a moment frozen to emptiness, and all other people will be utterly still and utterly frozen in front of all others, and there will be as many worlds as people and all people will be living in their own world where all other people are frozen solid.

I know I should record facts. Leave behind my testimony. Produce detailed accounts. Something posterity can verify and from which it can learn. Some time, long, long after my death, everything that happens here will be judged, and I should already be planning the means by which to ensure that my papers will outlive me, finding a route for them, a means of escape; whatever the price, finding a benefit and use for this stump of pencil and these few sheets of paper which, even now, practically while I write – such moves time – have managed to yellow. But I cannot. I cannot record facts. My soul does not work that way.

It doesn’t work at all.

It is nothing but a brain, a mechanism. Like the clock. And the body, it is the clock tower, built for one purpose and one purpose only: to hold.

Not to fall apart as the mechanism is dissected.

Perhaps they are watchmakers, those three officers.

But then I see time once more, and once more it is a miracle. He manages to sit up, my son. My wife clasps her hands, not that they touch his thin little back, but almost; it is like there is a field between her hand and his back, a magnetic field of life, and whatever exists between them, it also exists between myself and them, and I know that once I am no longer here, that magic which exists as a field of life between us, when it no longer exists they will no longer exist. They don’t exist. They are dead. I am dead. Then why do I move? The twitching of a fish with a broken neck. The march of the hen after her head is cut off.

I am becoming too eager.

Where is my restraint?

I will stop for today.

Enough.

Die.

15 February 1945

Live.

For a while longer. A few breaths longer.

Those crashes out on the streets, the clouds of stone dust blowing in through the window, they should wake hope. But I don’t dare hope. There is no hope left for me. My family is dead and my name is too high up on the list.

Our Tiergarten… How we wandered. The zoo on the other side of the canal. Franz had laughed and pointed at a pelican. He had been sitting on my shoulders.

No, this won’t do.

Or?

My son was on my shoulders. His little heels bumped against my jacket, leaving indelible marks. They are still there, though the jacket has been burnt and his shoes have been burnt and his tiny little feet have been burnt. They are still there, right in front of my eyes, and when my eyes burn those tiny little heel marks on my jacket, marks which made me so angry, they will still exist somewhere. They are chronicles. They are facts. They are testimonies and accounts.

They are life.

He pointed at the pelican and the pelican made an inimitable sound but Franz imitated it anyway; he sat on my shoulders and sounded exactly like the pelican on the other side of the water and how we laughed. I laughed, Magda laughed, and Franz laughed though he didn’t know why, and that laugh, that short, baseless laugh, has kept me alive here in the land of death. I am inching towards the top of the list.

One day very soon, I will make it, and then it will be like it is for Erwin. Erwin is not Jewish. I believe he belongs to the category they call ‘substandard humans’, with a slight disability which was essentially more social than genetic. He can’t be more than twenty. I could have been his father.

The treatment has made him confused. In the beginning, we had intelligent conversation; he knew nothing about contemporary society but plenty about the more eternal questions in life. He had considered it all. Had plenty of time to think. He has not rushed through life the way I have. Now, though, there isn’t much left. When I speak to him, there is no one there. He is nothing but an empty shell. Over the spot where it has been running out of his head, an innocent little gauze dressing.

It is worse than him being dead. He walks around like a constant reminder of what will soon happen to us all.

Not that there are many of us left.

But I am still many. I am Leo, I am Magda, I am Franz. And I am Erwin.

I am also Erwin.

16 February 1945

My son walked alongside me. He held my hand and we walked through the Tiergarten. It was dull and rainy, one of those bleak, wet autumn days Berlin so often enjoys – bleak, wet, remarkably beautiful. The leaves had started to fall from the trees. They mixed with the mud in the puddles to form a brownish-yellow sludge. Franz suddenly paused right next to one of these pools. He let go of my hand, turned round and hugged me.

He came just up to my navel.

We stood there for a moment in the cool, fine rain. I held him. I had nothing to say.

And then he let go.

He headed straight for the muddy pool. And as he walked, he sank down into it, inch by inch. He said not a word, he simply walked and walked and sank and sank until there was nothing left. His little black head disappeared with a gurgle. The surface was oddly calm.

And I, I just stood there watching him sink. Not a finger did I lift to save him. Not a finger.

We could have fled. Magda had been nagging me: ‘Your friends are leaving, your colleagues are leaving, everyone we know is leaving. But us, we’re staying. Why? Why do you want to stay and wait for death? Think of Franz, at the very least.’ And I said: ‘It can’t be that bad. This is the twentieth century. We have cars, aeroplanes, the microscope. We have democracy and contraceptives and psychoanalysis and liberal arts. All we need to do is to survive the winter, hibernate as the storm passes by.’

And I had been right: the storm did pass. But once it was gone, there was nothing left. We had been sucked into it. All of us.

Behind it, a desolate landscape.

I killed my son and I killed my wife. My stubbornness killed them.

Let everything be silent.

Let me die.