The Confession

5

That night the weary veterans, who had been out at Work Site Number Two all day, returned to the barracks. Some became angry when they found their bunks occupied by newcomers, while others, too weary to shout, simply dropped into a free shelf. Some questions were answered. We would know when to do what by a bugle call. When to wake, eat, and work. The work at Site Two-the new project Gogu had mentioned a long time ago-was digging: They were building a canal to the Tisa, about five and a half miles away.

The bugle sounded early, and I woke to the cold and a sweet, sickening smell. As I climbed down from the bunk, I asked a veteran who slept below me. He was an old man with a permanent look of worry on his face. “The pus,” he said. “You’ll smell like that once you’ve been hit enough. You’ll get worms, too, but don’t worry, they’ll clean those out in the infirmary.”

There were more truncheon blows when we gathered for the morning roll call behind the barracks. The sun had not yet risen, and in the darkness a guard with a wavering, young voice called the names and we each yelled “Here here! ” as loudly as we could. Gogu looked on from the door of his office. Halfway through the names a heavy, bearded guard reached forward and pulled one of the new prisoners-a student-out of our ranks and dragged him to an electrical pole. As the names continued, he shouted at the student to hold on to the pole, and as he did so, began beating the student’s back. Whenever the student screamed, he delivered a blow to his head. This went on until the student passed out. Roll call was over.

We had the same kind of soup and bread I’d had in Yalta 36, sitting outside in the cold, and were then marched through the predawn night out of the camp and farther east. I was hit a couple times by the barracks guard, and the old, worried man was hit three times. It impressed me that, despite the blackening welt that showed when his shirt rose from his hip, he could keep moving. There were about three hundred of us in all, being beaten across the wheatfields, two miles to Work Site Number Two.

The work on the canal had not been going on long. A crevice about fifty yards wide and a quarter of a mile long had been dug, and we were told that our daily quota was ten cubic yards. If we did not reach that quota, we would be punished. Each of us was given a shovel and a wheelbarrow and sent into the hole. They had picked a sandy area, and as we hefted the heavy wheelbarrows sand spilled out. The guard standing by the truck where we dumped it looked at each load critically, asked our name, and marked down an estimate. This went on.

The first day was the hardest. It was unbelievable how heavy those wheelbarrows were, and how undependable the sandy wall of the canal could get. Often I would make it halfway up, only to slide and see my entire load turn over. A guard would scream at me from above, accusing me of sabotage, while I tried to focus and fill it up again. I didn’t make the quota at all the first week, and each night, after a dinner of more soup, I cut wood outside, under the glare of the camp searchlights.

Although they sometimes made excuses, it became evident that the killings had no logic other than the logic of terror. Those who did not collapse on their own could at any moment be pulled out of roll calls, out of our dinner huddle, out of work details or bed. Sometimes a guard approached a prisoner in the morning and held a small mirror in front of his face. “Take a good look-this is the last time you’ll see yourself alive!” Then he handed the prisoner a burlap bag to carry to the work site, and that night the bag carried him back.

By the second week I was terrorized into submission.

I talked with the other prisoners during the rare instances when exhaustion did not make me mute. There were all kinds: students, Gypsies, factory workers, and even some who had been in the Party-the old worried man had been the head of his metalworking collective until he was turned in. “I know who it was, though,” he whispered to me one night, the worry suddenly fleeing his face. “Wlodja Stanislavsky. He’s one of the machinists, and for the last five years he’s been in love with my wife. But she would never touch that dirty Pole. So he decided to get rid of me.” He shook his head. “That bastard will only have her if he rapes her.”

His name was Tibor Petrescu. He had been in the camp for a month when I arrived, and each Sunday when we were allowed to rest he wrote his wife long, convoluted letters. At first I wrote letters, too. I wrote to Emil, asking him to find a way to get me out, and I wrote to Magda, in order to reassure her of my health and love. I had been a fool to let her and Agnes go-given the chance again, I would have sent Leonek to The Crocodile that night. How could I have hesitated when she asked to be taken back? In the camp I found the limits of my maturity. But after a while, I stopped writing altogether. I had asked Tibor if he ever received answers from his wife, and his no reminded me that mail did not leave this camp. Everything remained stacked in that steel cabinet in the commander’s office to be read over brandies and cigarettes, for a laugh.

I gave up, and gave in to the regime of work. I watched the other prisoners fall, and once brought back a burlap sack filled with Gyula, the student, thinking only that his fear had reached its end.

Despite all the sand we dug, the canal seemed to make no progress. Gogu arrived with a uniformed officer, shouting at us from above, and the next day the quota was raised to twelve cubic yards. I was just able to keep up, but Tibor fell short often, and at night I’d hear him grunting in the yard as I tried to sleep, then the thud as his ax hit wood.