Fatelessness

NINE

I reached home at roughly the same time of year as when I had left it. Certainly, the woods all around had already long turned green, grass had sprouted over the great pits of corpses, and the asphalt of the Appellplatz, derelict since the onset of the new age and strewn with the litter of cold campfires, all manner of rags, papers, and food cans, was already melting in the sweltering midsummer heat at Buchenwald when I too was asked whether I had any wish to undertake the journey. For the most part, the younger ones would be making the trip, led by a stocky, bespectacled man with graying hair, a functionary of the Hungarian camp committee, who is to take care of our travel arrangements. There is now a truck, and not least a willingness on the part of the American military, to transport us a stretch eastward, after which it will be up to us, he said, then encouraged us to call him “Uncle Miklós.” We have to get on with our lives, he added, and indeed there was not much else we could do after all, I realized — provided of course one had been given the chance to do so at all. On the whole, I could by now call myself able-bodied, except for a few oddities and minor disabilities. If I dug a finger into the flesh at some points on my body, for example, its mark, the depression it left, would remain visible for a long time afterward, just as if I had buried it in some lifeless, inelastic material like, say, cheese or wax. My face also startled me a bit when I first inspected it in a mirror in one of the comfortable rooms of the former SS hospital, as my recollection from older days had been of another face. Its conspicuously low forehead, the pair of brand-new, amorphous swellings by the oddly broadening bases of its ears, and its loose bags and sacks elsewhere, all under a brush of hair now an inch or so long, were on the whole — at least if I could believe my onetime reading matter — more the wrinkles, creases, and features of people who had gained them in diverse sensual pleasures and delights and aged prematurely on that account, while the beady, shrunken eyes had been retained in my mind as having another, more friendly, not to say reassuring, look. Then again, I had a limp, dragging my right leg a little: never mind, so says Uncle Miklós, the air back home will sort that out. At home, he declared, we would be building a new land, and he promptly taught us a few songs as a start. When we were tramping through villages and small towns, as occurred from time to time during our journey, we were later to sing these as we marched three abreast, in good military order. I personally was very fond of one called “Standing on the barricades before Madrid,” not that I could tell you why that one in particular. There was another too, though for different reasons, that I sang with pleasure, particularly for the sake of a passage that went: “We la-bor a-way all day long, / all but dying of star-va-tion. / But now our hands, hardened by travail, / clutch wea-pons that will pre-vail!” Again for different reasons, I liked the one with the line “The young guard of the pro-le-tar-i-at are we,” after which we were supposed to interject a shout of “Red Front!” since each and every time it rang out I would catch the clatter of a window being shut or the slam of a door, and each and every time spot a figure, German, scurrying under or hastily ducking behind a doorway.

In other respects, I set off on the journey with light baggage: an exceedingly narrow yet also, by comparison, exceedingly long and therefore somewhat ungainly light blue canvas contraption, an American military kit bag. In it were my two thick blankets, a change of underwear, a well-knit gray pullover, with green bands decorating the cuffs and neck, that had come from the abandoned SS storehouse, and a few provisions for the road: cans and the like. I wore green American army twills and a pair of what looked like hard-wearing, rubber-soled shoes over which were leggings of impervious leather, with the buckles and straps that went with them. For my head I had procured an odd-looking and, as it proved, rather unseasonably heavy kepi which, judging from its steep peak and the edges and corners of its skewed-square crown — what in geometry they had called a rhombus, I remembered from long-past school days — must once have belonged to a Polish officer, so I was told. I might have picked out a decent jacket from the storehouse perhaps, but in the end I made do with the trusty old striped garment, unchanged except for lacking the number and triangle, that had done me good service up till then; indeed, I specifically opted for it, one could say insisted on it, for this way at least there would be no misunderstandings, I reckoned, apart from which I found it very comfortable, practical, and cool to wear, at least right then, during the summer. We traveled by truck and cart, on foot, and public transport — whatever the various armies could put at our disposal. We slept on the back of an ox-drawn wagon, on the benches and teacher’s podium of a deserted schoolroom, or simply out under the star-studded summer night sky, on the flower beds and cushioned lawn of a park amid gingerbread houses. We even took a boat along a river — reminiscent, to my eyes at least, of the Danube, though smaller — that I learned was called the Elbe, and I also passed through a place that had clearly once been a city but was now no more than piles of stone with the occasional bare, blackened wall poking up here and there. The inhabitants were now living, residing, and sleeping at the foot of these walls, heaps of rubble, and also what was left of the bridges, and I tried to take pleasure at that sight, naturally, only I could not help being made to feel — by the selfsame people — somewhat uneasy at doing so. I took a trip on a red streetcar, and traveled on a proper train that was pulling proper carriages in which there were proper compartments for people — even if, as it happened, the only place available was up on the roof. I alighted in a city where one could hear a lot of Hungarian being spoken as well as Czech, and a crowd of women, old people, men, all sorts, gathered around us near the station as we were waiting for the promised connecting train that evening. They inquired whether we had come from the concentration camps and interrogated a lot of us, me included, as to whether one had chanced to meet up with some relative, someone with such and such a name. I told them that in a concentration camp people generally did not have much use for names. Then they would endeavor to describe the external appearance, hair color, and distinctive features, so I tried to get them to see that it was pointless, since most people changed a lot in the camps. On that, those around me slowly dispersed, except for one man in very summery clothing of just shirt and trousers, his thumbs hooked behind the belt, just next to the straps of his suspenders on either side, and his fingers meanwhile drumming on the material; he was curious, and this made me smile a bit, as to whether I had seen the gas chambers. I said to him: “If I had, we wouldn’t be standing around talking now.” “Yes, of course,” he rejoined, but had there actually been any gas chambers, so I said, sure, there were gas chambers too, naturally, among other things; it all depends, I added, what type of person was in which camp. In Auschwitz, for instance, you could bet on it. “But in my case,” I noted, “I’ve come from Buchenwald.” “From where?” he asked, so I had to repeat it: “Buchenwald.” “So, from Buchenwald, then,” he nodded, and I said, “That’s right.” “Let’s get this straight, then,” he said in response, with a stiff, austere, yet somehow almost preachy face. “You, sir,” and I don’t know why but I was almost stunned by this very formal and, I would say, somewhat punctilious mode of address, “you have heard about the existence of gas chambers,” so I said, sure I had. “Nonetheless, sir,” he carried on with that same austerity of one who is restoring things to order and clarity, “you personally, however, did not ascertain this with your own eyes,” and I had to admit that I hadn’t. To that he merely remarked, “I see,” and after giving a curt nod strode away, stiffly, erectly, and as far as I could see, unless I was very much mistaken, satisfied in some manner. Soon after that the call came to get moving, the train was in, and I actually managed to grab quite a decent place on the broad wooden steps of the boarding platform. I awoke around dawn to find we were puffing along merrily. Later on, I became conscious that I was now able to read the names of all the places we were passing through in Hungarian. The body of water that was being pointed out and dazzling my eyes was the Danube; the land all around, baking and shimmering in the bright sunshine, was now Hungarian they said. A while later, we pulled up under a dilapidated roof with, at the far end, a concourse full of smashed windows: the Western Railway Terminal, people around me remarked, and so it was, I recognized by and large.

Outside, in front of the building, the sun was blazing down straight onto the sidewalk. The heat, noise, dust, and traffic were prodigious. The streetcars were yellow, with a No. 6 on them, so that had not changed either. There were vendors too, selling odd-looking pastries, newspapers, and other goods. The people were very good-looking, and palpably all of them had some errand, some important business; all were hurrying, rushing, running somewhere, jostling, in all directions. We too, I was informed, had to take ourselves straight off to the emergency bureau and get our names registered right away in order to receive as soon as possible the money and documents that were now indispensable appurtenances of life. The place in question, I learned, was to be found near the other main station, the Eastern Railway Terminal, so we boarded a streetcar at the very first intersection. Though I found the streets rather shabby, with the terracing of houses showing gaps here and there, while those still standing were run-down or damaged, with holes in their walls or without windows, I still could more or less recognize the route and thus the square too at which we got off. We located the emergency bureau, just opposite what still existed in my memory as — yes, that was it — a cinema, in one of the bigger, ugly, gray public buildings, the courtyard, vestibule, and corridors of which were already packed with people. They were sitting, standing, bustling, shouting, chattering, or just silent. Lots of them were in miserable clothing, the cast-off gear and caps of concentration camps and army stores, some — like me — in striped jackets, but now, as touches of bourgeois tidiness, with white shirt and necktie, hands clasped behind the back and immersed in dignified deliberations about important matters, just as they had done before they went to Auschwitz. In one place they were recalling and comparing conditions in different camps, in another dissecting the likely prospects for the sum and extent of the assistance, still others were considering what they saw as fussy formalities and unlawful benefits, the advantages others were gaining at their expense, injustices in the procedures, but on one thing everyone was agreed: one had to wait, and for a long time too. Except I found it all extremely tiresome; so, slinging my kit bag over my back, I soon traipsed back into the courtyard, then on outside the gate. Spotting the cinema again, it occurred to me that if I were to turn right and go one or at most two blocks, that would bring me, if memory served me right, to Forget-me-not Road.

It was easy to find the house: it was intact, not a whit different from the other yellow or gray and somewhat ramshackle houses in the street — or so it seemed to me at least. From the dog-eared list of names in the cool gateway, I ascertained that the number also tallied and that I would need to go up to the second floor. At a leisurely pace, I climbed up the musty, slightly acrid-smelling stairwell, through the windows of which I was able to see the outside corridors and, down below, the woefully bare courtyard, a sparse patch of grass in the middle, then the usual disconsolate tree doing its best with its scrawny, dust-choked foliage. A woman with her hair in a net had just whisked out with a duster over on the other side; strains of music could be heard, and a child was bawling its head off somewhere. I was hugely surprised when a door opened in front of me, and after such a long time, all of a sudden, I again caught sight of Bandi Citrom’s tiny, slanted eyes, only now in the face of a still fairly young, black-haired, slightly thickset, and not particularly tall woman. She took a slight step backward, no doubt, I supposed, because of my jacket, and to avoid having the door slammed in my face I immediately asked, “Is Bandi Citrom at home?” “No,” she replied. I asked if he happened to be out just at the moment, to which she responded, with a little shake of the head and closing her eyes, “Not at all,” and it was only when she opened them again that I noticed a glistening film of moisture on the lower lashes. Her lips were quivering a little as well, so I thought it best to make myself scarce as quickly as possible, but then all at once a slight elderly woman in a dark dress and headscarf emerged from the gloom of the hallway, which meant that before I could go I had to tell her too, “I’m looking for Bandi Citrom,” to which she too said, “He’s not home.” She, though, took the line “Come back some other time; maybe in a few days,” but I noticed that the younger woman responded to that by slightly averting her head, in an odd, defensive, and yet somehow feeble movement, meanwhile raising the back of a hand to her mouth, as if she were seeking, perhaps, to suppress, stifle as it were, some remark or sound she was anxious to make. I then felt bound to tell the old woman, “We were together,” to explain, “at Zeitz,” and to her somehow stern, almost reproachful question of “So why didn’t you come home together?” almost apologize, “We got separated. I ended up somewhere else.” She also wanted to know, “Are there still any Hungarians out there?” so I replied, “Sure, plenty of them.” At that, in a tone of evident triumph, she remarked to the young woman “See!” then to me, “I’m always telling her that they are only now starting to return. But my daughter is impatient; she doesn’t want to believe it anymore,” and I was about to say, but then thought better of it and held my tongue, that in my view she had the clearer head, she knew Bandi Citrom better. She invited me in after that, but I told her I still had to get back home myself. “No doubt your parents are waiting,” she said, to which I replied “Of course.” “Well then,” she remarked, “you’d better hurry; let them be happy,” at which I left.

Since I was really starting to feel my leg by the time I got to the station, and since, among the many streetcars there, one with the number I knew from the old days just happened to be swinging in ahead of me, I got on. On the open platform of the streetcar, a gaunt old woman with a queer, old-fashioned lace trimming on her dress edged away a bit to the side. Soon a man in cap and uniform came along and asked me to show my ticket. I told him I didn’t have one. He suggested I buy one, so I said I had just got back from abroad and didn’t have any money. He inspected my jacket, me, then the old woman as well, before informing me that there were travel regulations, they weren’t his rules but had been brought in by his superiors. “If you don’t buy a ticket, you’ll have to get off,” he declared. I told him my leg was hurting, at which, I couldn’t help noticing, the old woman abruptly turned away to face the outside scene, yet somehow, I had no idea why, with such an affronted air it was as if I had insulted her personally. However, at that moment, with a commotion already audible from some way off, a burly man with dark, matted hair burst through the doorway from the inside compartment. He was in an open-necked shirt and light linen suit, with a black box slung from a strap on his shoulder and an attaché case in his hand. What’s all this, he was shouting, and then ordered, “Give him a ticket!” handing, or rather thrusting, a coin at the conductor. I tried to thank him but he cut me off and, casting a furious look around, said, “More to the point, some people ought to be ashamed of themselves,” but the conductor was by then passing into the carriage while the old woman carried on gazing out into the street. His face calmer, he then turned toward me. “Have you come from Germany, son?” “Yes.” “From the concentration camps?” “Naturally.” “Which one?” “Buchenwald.” Yes, he had heard of it; he knew it was “one of the pits of the Nazi hell,” as he put it. “Where did they carry you off from?” “From Budapest.” “How long were you there?” “A year in total.” “You must have seen a lot, young fellow, a lot of terrible things,” he rejoined, but I said nothing. “Still,” he continued, “the main thing is that it’s over, in the past,” and, his face brightening, he gestured to the houses that we happened to be rumbling past and inquired what I was feeling now, back home again and seeing the city that I had left. “Hatred,” I told him. He fell silent at that but soon volunteered that, sadly, he had to understand why I felt that way. In any case, “under the circumstances,” he reckoned, hatred too had its place, its role, “even its uses,” adding that he supposed we could agree on that, and he was well aware whom I must hate. “Everyone,” I told him. He fell silent, this time for a longer period, before starting up again: “Did you have to endure many horrors?” to which I replied that it all depended what he considered to be a horror. No doubt, he declared, his expression now somewhat uneasy, I had undergone a lot of deprivation, hunger, and more than likely they had beaten me, to which I said: naturally. “Why, my dear boy,” he exclaimed, though now, so it seemed to me, on the verge of losing his patience, “do you keep on saying ‘naturally,’ and always about things that are not at all natural?” I told him that in a concentration camp they were natural. “Yes, of course, of course,” he says, “they were there , but…,” and he broke off, hesitating slightly, “but… I mean, a concentration camp in itself is unnatural,” finally hitting on the right word as it were. I didn’t even bother saying anything to this, as I was beginning slowly to realize that it seems there are some things you just can’t argue about with strangers, the ignorant, with those who, in a certain sense, are mere children so to say. In any case, suddenly becoming aware that we had reached the square, still standing there, only a bit bleaker and less well tended, and that this was where I needed to get off, I told him as much. He stuck with me, however, and, pointing across to a shaded bench that had lost its backboard, suggested we sit down for a minute.

He seemed somewhat uncertain at first. The truth was, he remarked, only now were the “horrors really starting to come to light,” and he added that “for the time being, the world stands uncomprehending before the question of how, how it could have happened at all.” I said nothing, but at this point he turned around to face me fully and suddenly asked, “Would you care to give an account of your experiences, young fellow?” I was somewhat dumbfounded, and replied that there was not a whole lot I could tell him that would be of much interest. He smiled a little and said, “Not me — the whole world.” Even more amazed, I asked, “But what about?” “The hell of the camps,” he replied, to which I remarked that I had nothing at all to say about that as I was not acquainted with hell and couldn’t even imagine what that was like. He assured me, however, that it was just a manner of speaking: “Can we imagine a concentration camp as anything but a hell?” he asked, and I replied, as I scratched a few circles with my heel in the dust under my feet, that everyone could think what they liked about it, but as far as I was concerned I could only imagine a concentration camp, since I was somewhat acquainted with what that was, but not hell. “All the same, say you could?” he pressed, and after a few more circles I replied, “Then I would imagine it as a place where it is impossible to become bored,” seeing as how that had been possible in the concentration camp, even in Auschwitz — under certain conditions of course. He fell silent for a while before going on to ask, though rather as if it were now somehow against his better judgment: “And how do you account for that?” After brief reflection, I came up with “Time.” “What do you mean, time?” “Time helps.” “Helps?… With what?” “Everything,” and I tried to explain how different it was, for example, to arrive in a not exactly opulent but still, on the whole, agreeable, neat, and clean station where everything becomes clear only gradually, sequentially over time, step-by-step. By the time one has passed a given step, put it behind one, the next one is already there. By the time one knows everything, one has already understood it all. And while one is coming to understand everything, a person does not remain idle: he is already attending to his new business, living, acting, moving, carrying out each new demand at each new stage. Were it not for that sequencing in time, and were the entire knowledge to crash in upon a person on the spot, at one fell swoop, it might well be that neither one’s brain nor one’s heart would cope with it, I tried to enlighten him somewhat, upon which, having meanwhile fished a tattered pack from his pocket, he offered me one of his crumpled cigarettes, which I declined, but then, having taken two deep drags, he set both elbows on his knees and leaned his upper body forward, not so much as looking at me, as he said in a somehow lackluster, flat tone, “I see.” On the other hand, I continued, the flaw in that, the drawback you might say, is that the time has to be occupied somehow. For instance, I told him, I had seen prisoners who had already been — or to be more accurate were still — in concentration camps for four, six, even twelve years. Now, those people somehow had to fill each one of those four, six, or twelve years, which in the latter case means twelve times three hundred and sixty-five days, which is to say twelve times three hundred and sixty-five times twenty-four hours, and twelve times three hundred and sixty-five times twenty-four times… and so on back, every second, every minute, every hour, every day of it, in its entirety. From yet another angle, though, I added, this is exactly what can also help them, because if the whole twelve times three hundred and sixty-five times twenty-four times sixty times sixtyfold chunk of time had been dumped around their necks instantaneously, at a stroke, most likely they too would have been unable to stand it, either physically or mentally, in the way they actually did manage to stand it: “That, roughly, is the way you have imagined it.” At this, still in the same position as earlier, only now instead of holding the cigarette, which he had meanwhile discarded, with his head between his hands and in an even duller, even more choking voice, he said: “No, it’s impossible to imagine it.” For my part, I could see that, and I even thought to myself: so, that must be why they prefer to talk about hell instead.

Soon after that, though, he straightened up, looked at his watch, and his expression changed. He informed me that he was a journalist, “for a democratic paper” moreover, as he added, and it was only at this point that it came to me which figure from the remote past, from this and that he had said, he reminded me of: Uncle Willie — albeit, I conceded, with about as much difference and indeed, I would say, authoritativeness as I could detect in, let’s say, the rabbi’s words and especially his actions, his degree of obstinacy, were I to compare them with those of Uncle Lajos. That thought suddenly reminded me, made me conscious, really for the first time in fact, of the no doubt shortly impending reunion, so I did not listen too closely to what the journalist said after that. He would like, he said, to turn our chance encounter into a “stroke of luck,” proposing that we write an article, set the ball rolling on “a series of articles.” He would write the articles, but basing them exclusively on my own words. That would allow me to make some money, the value of which I would no doubt appreciate at the threshold of my “new life”—“not that I can offer very much,” he added with a somewhat apologetic smile, since the paper was a new title and “its financial resources are as yet meager.” But anyway, the most important aspect right now, he considered, was not that so much as “the healing of still-bleeding wounds and punishment of the guilty.” First and foremost, however, “public opinion has to be mobilized” and “apathy, indifference, even doubts” dissipated. Platitudes were of no use at all here; what was needed, according to him, was an uncovering of the causes, the truth, however “painful the ordeal” of facing up to it. He discerned “much originality” in my words, all in all a manifestation of the age, some sort of “sad symbol” of the times, if I understood him properly, which was “a new, individual color in the tiresome flood of brute facts,” as he put it, after which he asked what I thought of that. I noted that before all else I needed to attend to my own affairs, but he must have misunderstood me, it seems, because he said, “No, this is no longer just your own affair. It’s all of ours, the world’s.” So I said, yes, that might well be, but now it was high time for me to get back home, at which he asked me to “excuse” him. We got to our feet, but he was evidently still hesitating, weighing something up. Might we not launch the articles, he wondered, with a picture of the moment of reunion? I said nothing, at which, with a little half smile, he remarked that “a journalist’s craft sometimes forces one to be tactless,” but if that was not to my liking, then he, for his part, had no wish “to push” the matter. He then sat down, opened a black notebook on his knee, speedily wrote something down, then tore the page out and, again rising to his feet, handed it to me. His name and the address of the editorial office were on it; after he had said farewell with a “hoping to see you soon,” I felt the cordial grip of his hot, fleshy, slightly sweaty palm. I too had found the conversation pleasant and relaxing, the man likable and well meaning. Waiting only until his figure had disappeared into the swarm of passersby, I tossed the slip of paper away.

A few steps later I recognized our house. It was still there, intact, trim as ever. I was welcomed by the old smell in the entrance hall, the decrepit elevator in its grilled shaft and the old, yellow-worn stairs, and farther up the stairwell I was also able to greet the landing that was memorable for a certain singular, intimate moment. On reaching the second floor, I rang the bell at our door. It soon opened, but only as far as an inner lock, the chain of one of those safety bolts, allowed, which slightly surprised me as I had no recollection of any such device from before. The face peering at me from the chink in the door, the yellow, bony face of a roughly middle-aged woman, was also new to me. She asked who I was looking for, and I told her this was where I lived. “No,” she said, “ we live here,” and would have shut the door at that, except that my foot was preventing her. I tried explaining that there must be a mistake, because this was where I had gone away from, and it was quite certain that we lived there, whereas she assured me, with an amiable, polite, but regretful shaking of the head, that it was me who was mistaken, since there was no question that this was where they lived, meanwhile striving to shut — and I to stop her from shutting — the door. During a moment when I looked up at the number to check whether I might possibly have confused the door, I must have released my foot, so her effort prevailed, and I heard the key being turned twice in the lock of the slammed door.

On my way back to the stairwell, a familiar door brought me to a stop. I rang, and before long a stout matronly figure came into view. She too, in a manner I was now getting accustomed to, was just about to close the door when from behind her back there was a glint of spectacles, and Uncle Fleischmann’s gray face emerged dimly in the gloom. A paunch, slippers, a big, ruddy head, a boyish hair-parting, and a burned-out cigar stub separated themselves from beside him: old Steiner. Just the way I had last seen them, as if it were only yesterday, on the evening before the customs post. They stood there, mouths agape, then called out my name, and old Steiner even embraced me just as I was, sweaty, in my cap and striped jacket. They led me into the living room, while Aunt Fleischmann hurried off into the kitchen to see about “a bite to eat,” as she put it. I had to answer the usual questions as to where, how, when, and what, then later I asked my questions and learned that other people really were now living in our apartment. “What else?” I inquired. Since they somehow didn’t seem to get what I meant, I asked “My father?” At that they clammed up completely. After a short pause, a hand — maybe Uncle Steiner’s, I suppose— slowly lifted and set off in the air before settling like a cautious, aging bat on my arm. From what they recounted after that, all I could make out, in essence, was that “unfortunately, there is no room for us to doubt the accuracy of the tragic news” since “it is based on the testimony of comrades in misfortune,” according to whom my father “passed away after a brief period of suffering… in a German camp,” which was actually located on Austrian soil, oh, what’s the name of it, dear me…, so I said “Mauthausen”—“Mauthausen!” they enthused, before recovering their gravity: “Yes, that’s it.” I then asked if they happened by any chance to have news of my mother, to which they immediately said but of course, and good news at that: she was alive and well, she had come by the house only a couple of months ago, they had seen her with their own eyes, spoken to her, she had asked after me. What about my stepmother, I was curious to know, and I was told: “She has remarried since, to be sure.” “To whom, I wonder?” I inquired, and they again became stuck on the name. One of them said “Some Kovács fellow, as best I know,” while the other contradicted: “No, not Kovács, more like Futó.” So I said “Sütő,” at which they again nodded delightedly, affirming just as before: “Yes, of course, that’s it: Sütő.” I had much to thank her for, “everything, as a matter of fact,” they went on to relate: she had “saved the family fortune,” she “hid it during the hard times,” was how they put it. “Perhaps,” mused Uncle Fleischmann, “she jumped the gun a little,” and old Steiner concurred in this. “In the final analysis, though,” he added, “it’s understandable,” and that in turn was acknowledged by the other old boy.

After that, I sat between the two of them for a while, it having been a long time since I had sat on a comfortable settee with claret red velvet upholstery. Aunt Fleischmann appeared in the meantime, bringing in a decoratively bordered white china plate on which was a round of bread and dripping garnished with ground paprika and finely sliced onion rings, because her recollection was that I had been extremely fond of that in the past, as I promptly confirmed I still was. The two old men meanwhile recounted that “it wasn’t a picnic back here either, to be sure.” From what they related I gained an impression, the nebulous outlines of some tangled, confused, undecipherable event of which I could basically see and understand little. Instead, all I picked out from what they had to say was the continual, almost tiresomely recurrent reiteration of a phrase that was used to designate every new twist, turn, and episode: thus, for instance, the yellow-star houses “came about,” October the fifteenth “came about,” the Arrow-Cross regime “came about,” the ghetto “came about,” the Danube-bank shootings “came about,” liberation “came about.” Not to mention the usual fault: it was as if this entire blurred event, seemingly unimaginable in its reality and by now beyond reconstruction in its details even for them, as far as I could see, had not occurred in the regular rhythmic passage of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months but so to say all at once, in a single swirl or giddy spell somehow, maybe at some strange afternoon gathering that unexpectedly descends into debauchery, for instance, when the many participants — not knowing why — all of a sudden lose their sanity and in the end, perhaps, are no longer aware of what they are doing. At some point they fell silent, then, after a pause, old Fleischmann suddenly asked: “And what are your plans for the future?” I was mildly astonished, telling him I had not given it much thought. At that, the other old boy stirred, bending toward me on his seat. The bat soared again, this time alighting on my knee rather than my arm. “Before all else,” he declared, “you must put the horrors behind you.” Increasingly amazed, I asked, “Why should I?” “In order,” he replied, “to be able to live,” at which Uncle Fleischmann nodded and added, “Live freely,” at which the other old boy nodded and added, “One cannot start a new life under such a burden,” and I had to admit he did have a point. Except I didn’t quite understand how they could wish for something that was impossible, and indeed I made the comment that what had happened had happened, and anyway, when it came down to it, I could not give orders to my memory. I would only be able to start a new life, I ventured, if I were to be reborn or if some affliction, disease, or something of the sort were to affect my mind, which they surely didn’t wish on me, I hoped. “In any case,” I added, “I didn’t notice any atrocities,” at which, I could see, they were greatly astounded. What were they supposed to understand by that, they wished to know, by “I didn’t notice”? To that, however, I asked them in turn what they had done during those “hard times.” “Errm, . we lived,” one of them deliberated. “We tried to survive,” the other added. Precisely! They too had taken one step at a time, I noted. What did I mean by taking a “step,” they floundered, so I related to them how it had gone in Auschwitz, by way of example. For each train — and I am not saying it was always necessarily this number, since I have no way of knowing — but at any rate in our case you have to reckon on around three thousand people. Take the men among them — a thousand, let’s say. For the sake of the example, you can reckon on one or two seconds per case, more often one than two. Ignore the very first and very last, because they don’t count; but in the middle, where I too was standing, you would therefore have to allow ten to twenty minutes before you reach the point where it is decided whether it will be gas immediately or a reprieve for the time being. Now, all this time the queue is constantly moving, progressing, and everyone is taking steps, bigger or smaller ones, depending on what the speed of the operation demands.

A brief hush ensued, broken only by a single sound: Aunt Fleischmann took the empty dish from in front of me and carried it away; nor did I see her return subsequently. The two old boys asked, “What has that got to do with it, and what do you mean by it?” Nothing in particular, I replied, but it was not quite true that the thing “came about”; we had gone along with it too. Only now, and thus after the event, looking back, in hindsight, does the way it all “came about” seem over, finished, unalterable, finite, so tremendously fast, and so terribly opaque. And if, in addition, one knows one’s fate in advance, of course. Then indeed one can only register the passing of time. A senseless kiss, for example, is just as much a necessity as an idle day at the customs post, let’s say, or the gas chambers. Except that whether one looks back or ahead, both are flawed perspectives, I suggested. After all, there are times when twenty minutes, in and of themselves, can be quite a lot of time. Each minute had started, endured, and then ended before the next one started. Now, I said, let’s just consider: every one of those minutes might in fact have brought something new. In reality it didn’t, naturally, but still, one must acknowledge that it might have; when it comes down to it, each and every minute something else might have happened other than what actually did happen, at Auschwitz just as much as, let’s suppose, here at home, when we took leave of my father.

Those last words somehow roused old Steiner. “But what could we do?” he asked, his face part irate, part affronted. “Nothing, naturally,” I said, “or rather, anything,” I added, “which would have been just as senseless as doing nothing, yet again and just as naturally.” “But it’s not about that,” I tried to carry on, to explain it to them. “So what is it about, then?” they asked, almost losing patience, to which I replied, with growing anger on my part as well, I sensed: “It’s about the steps.” Everyone took steps as long as he was able to take a step; I too took my own steps, and not just in the queue at Birkenau, but even before that, here, at home. I took steps with my father, and I took steps with my mother, I took steps with Annamarie, and I took steps — perhaps the most difficult ones of all — with the older sister. I would now be able to tell her what it means to be “Jewish”: nothing, nothing to me at least, at the beginning, until those steps start to be taken. None of it is true, there is no different blood, nothing else, only… and I faltered, but suddenly something the journalist had said came to mind: there are only given situations and the new givens inherent in them. I too had lived through a given fate. It had not been my own fate, but I had lived through it, and I simply couldn’t understand why they couldn’t get it into their heads that I now needed to start doing something with that fate, needed to connect it to somewhere or something; after all, I could no longer be satisfied with the notion that it had all been a mistake, blind fortune, some kind of blunder, let alone that it had not even happened. I could see, and only too well, that they did not really understand, that my words were not much to their liking, indeed it seemed as if one thing or another was actually irritating them. I saw that every now and then Uncle Steiner was about to interrupt or elsewhere about to jump to his feet, but I saw the other old man restraining him, heard him saying, “Leave him be! Can’t you see he only wants to talk? Let him talk! Just leave him be!” and talk I did, albeit possibly to no avail and even a little incoherently. Even so, I made it clear to them that we can never start a new life, only ever carry on the old one. I took the steps, no one else, and I declared that I had been true to my given fate throughout. The sole blot, or one might say fly in the ointment, the sole accident with which they might reproach me was the fact that we should be sitting there talking now — but then I couldn’t help that. Did they want this whole honesty and all the previous steps I had taken to lose all meaning? Why this sudden about-face, this refusal to accept? Why did they not wish to acknowledge that if there is such a thing as fate, then freedom is not possible? If, on the other hand — I swept on, more and more astonished myself, steadily warming to the task — if there is such a thing as freedom, then there is no fate; that is to say — and I paused, but only long enough to catch my breath — that is to say, then we ourselves are fate, I realized all at once, but with a flash of clarity I had never experienced before. I was even a little sorry that I was only facing them and not some more intelligent or, if I may put it this way, worthier counterparts; but then they were the ones there right now, they are — or so it appeared at that moment at least — everywhere, and in any case they had also been there when we had said farewell to my father. They too had taken their own steps. They too had known, foreseen, everything beforehand, they too had said farewell to my father as if we had already buried him, and even later on all they had squabbled about was whether I should take the suburban train or the bus to Auschwitz… At this point not only Uncle Steiner but old Fleischmann as well jumped to his feet. Even now he was still striving to restrain himself, but was no longer capable of doing so: “What!” he bawled, his face red as a beetroot and beating his chest with his fist: “So it’s us who’re the guilty ones, is it? Us, the victims!” I tried explaining that it wasn’t a crime; all that was needed was to admit it, meekly, simply, merely as a matter of reason, a point of honor, if I might put it that way. It was impossible, they must try and understand, impossible to take everything away from me, impossible for me to be neither winner nor loser, for me not to be right and for me not to be mistaken that I was neither the cause nor the effect of anything; they should try to see, I almost pleaded, that I could not swallow that idiotic bitterness, that I should merely be innocent. But I could see they did not wish to understand anything, and so, picking up my kit bag and cap, I departed in the midst of a few disjointed words and motions, one more unfinished gesture and incomplete utterance from each.

Down below I was greeted by the street. I needed to take a streetcar to my mother’s place, but now it dawned on me that I had no money of course, so I decided to walk. In order to gather my strength, I paused for a minute in the square, by the aforementioned bench. Over ahead, in the direction that I would need to take, where the street appeared to lengthen, expand, and fade away into infinity, the fleecy clouds over the indigo hills were already turning purple and the sky, a shade of claret. Around me it was as if something had changed: the traffic had dwindled, people’s steps had slowed, their voices become quieter, their features grown softer, and it was as if their faces were turning toward one another. It was that peculiar hour, I recognized even now, even here — my favorite hour in the camp, and I was seized by a sharp, painful, futile longing for it: nostalgia, homesickness. Suddenly, it sprang to life, it was all here and bubbling inside me, all its strange moods surprised me, its fragmentary memories set me trembling. Yes, in a certain sense, life there had been clearer and simpler. Everything came back to mind, and I considered everyone in turn, both those who were of no interest as well as those whose only recognition would come in this reckoning, the fact that I was here: Bandi Citrom, Pyetchka, Bohoosh, the doctor, and all the rest. Now, for the very first time, I thought about them with a touch of reproach, a kind of affectionate rancor.

But one shouldn’t exaggerate, as this is precisely the crux of it: I am here, and I am well aware that I shall accept any rationale as the price for being able to live. Yes, as I looked around this placid, twilit square, this street, weather-beaten yet full of a thousand promises, I was already feeling a growing and accumulating readiness to continue my uncontinuable life. My mother was waiting, and would no doubt greatly rejoice over me. I recollect that she had once conceived a plan that I should be an engineer, a doctor, or something like that. No doubt that is how it will be, just as she wished; there is nothing impossible that we do not live through naturally, and keeping a watch on me on my journey, like some inescapable trap, I already know there will be happiness. For even there, next to the chimneys, in the intervals between the torments, there was something that resembled happiness. Everyone asks only about the hardships and the “atrocities,” whereas for me perhaps it is that experience which will remain the most memorable. Yes, the next time I am asked, I ought to speak about that, the happiness of the concentration camps.

If indeed I am asked. And provided I myself don’t forget.