A History of Forgetting (21 page)

‘What did they look like?' Thi asked.

‘I only saw one,' Alison told them. ‘He had something
shaved on the back of his head.'

‘What?'

Maybe it was the first time she had actually said the word. She swallowed and felt it sticking in her throat. ‘A swastika.'

They recoiled, recoiled and gaped. ‘Who would do that?' Robert asked, looking like he would spit. All of a sudden they seemed angry, angry at her, though what had she done but
volunteer to do what no one else had dared? Nevertheless,
she felt guilty, as if by talking about the three of them here, at Vitae, she had let them in.

‘Where did they come from?' they wanted to know.

The suburbs. ‘Surrey,' Alison said, but even as she told them, she knew, in fact, that they had come straight out of the past. She remembered last fall when she had offended Mrs. Soloff with her stupidity.

An awful day. No one spoke. Over the last few weeks, they had grown as close as a family, but in one day they fractured and each of them stood alone on her little shard of shock and grief.

 

Alison had not been to the public library since she was a girl. Going in after work, she felt unaccountably self-conscious, though it was hardly an imposing place—a single large room crowded with metal shelves in the basement of the community centre. Where to begin to look? She went over to a computer and tentatively pressed a button, but the machine only bleeped with irritation, yielding nothing.

The librarian was busy at her desk. At last she noticed Alison standing there, and took off her glasses, letting them hang on her chest from the beaded chain. ‘I'm looking for a book,' Alison told her.

‘Any particular subject?'

‘Nazis,' she said.

The librarian's expression remained neutral, though Ali
son expected her to be shocked, expected her at least to ask the
reason for her search. All she did was rise from her desk and
somewhat ominously say, ‘I'll show you where to find History.'

There were books about the different battles, about Hitler and Stalin. A book about the Holocaust and another on Vichy France. The librarian pulled down
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

‘This is a good overview.'

Alison opened it. The pages were black with text.

Instead she picked
A Photographic History of the Third Reich.
She didn't look at it on the bus. It didn't seem appropriate. She sat with the burden of the book in her lap and her hands spread open to conceal the cover.

Home, she brought it to the couch and began flipping through the pages at random. Though all the photographs in the book were in black and white, the first image her eye
landed on was a colour legend. It showed, sewn on the breast of a striped prison uniform, a simple triangle. The caption under
neath explained how the triangles were different colours, according to each prisoner's ‘offence'. She read the words ‘Jew' and ‘gypsy' and ‘homosexual' and quickly turned the page.

And found herself staring at a pair of half-shadowed naked buttocks, the same striped shirt lifted to the waist. Across the one buttock not obscured were more stripes, diagonal from the lash, the black lips of the welts raised between the weeping lacerations.

How to respond to such an image? Alison, so accustomed
to photographs of beauty—of couture and models—tried not to shrink. She thought of Christian. Unimaginable, his
wounds.

She skipped ahead to a dump or midden full of eggshell fragments and black molten lumps. In the middle was a bald head of indeterminate sex, face fixed in a grimace—the charred head of a mannequin, her first thought. But no. Here was a foot, too, lying half carbonized in the ash. The shells were shards of bone. It was an open-air crematorium.

She had her face partly turned away. She thought she would be sick and hurriedly flipped the pages again, closer to the front.

A bloated dandy in a feathered cap. Hermann, she read. Hermann Goering, ‘master of the hunt', a falcon perched on his puffy forearm. In the sky above him, someone had written something in blue ink.

He was a good man.

Alison blinked. Someone in this very city thought and had written here with a ballpoint pen that this Nazi person,
Hermann Goering, was
good.

Cringing, she tore the page out, tore it into an impossible jigsaw, into ugly confetti, then scooped up the tiny pieces in both hands and carried them to the kitchen to dispose of. Some pieces had escaped, she noticed on her way back to the living room. Crouching to collect them, she saw the carpet packed with crumbs and dirt.

Alison had been waiting Billy out. For almost two
months the vacuum cleaner had stood in the bedroom closet,
silenced. She went and got it now, hauled it out, wrangled it on unaligned wheels down the hall. Intractable, it tripped her with its nozzle. When she plugged it in, to her surprise, it
sparked and shocked her, then backfired, spewing dust. There she sat, on the floor, staring up in horror as the dust descended.
Uniformly grey, it was the very colour of ash and, because her mouth was open, she could taste it.

Billy was home by the time she got out of the shower; she began to cry explaining the mess. ‘I'll deal with it,' he promised and, sure enough, ten minutes later, when she tentatively poked her head out of the bedroom door, the rabid thing had been disposed of, though the carpet was still grey.

Dust, Billy told her, was mostly flakes of human skin.

Alison shuddered. It had tasted sweet.

After dinner, Billy stretched out to watch a hockey game with Alison cross-legged at the other end of the couch, the book weighing down her lap. She opened it close to where she had torn the page out, saw three peasant girls in a field, their blonde braids pinned in a halo; in the background, a boy on an archaic tractor beamed. The facing photograph showed the same beautiful people wearing gowns and tuxedoes, dancing in a ballroom. She bent closer. Not the same people, it was just that the fair-haired and gorgeous looked so much alike.

‘The Aryan Ideal' read the caption.

‘Yes!' cried Billy. ‘Yes!'

She glanced at the TV just as a player lurched unimpeded towards the net and scored.
‘Et le but!'

A throng rallying in a square. On every flagpole, the bloody
rectangle of sky, a crook-legged spider squashed against the moon. Staring down at the photo, she heard them roar.

Billy muted the set for the commercials and, standing over her, asked if she wanted a beer.

‘No, thanks.'

He clicked sock heels together, his right arm swinging upward stiffly. Intense, fierce with concentration, he held the pose.

‘Billy,' she said. ‘Don't.'

Slowly, very slowly, he turned his head and sniffed his
armpit.

Alison was not amused. She left him to his game and went to the bedroom with the book.

Kristallnacht—
all the windows of the pretty shops
smashed. On a brick wall someone had painted ‘
Jude
.
' Then the stars sewn on coats, the trains, the bewildered assembly on the platform, the boxcars crammed with human cargo. She closed the book and held it to her chest a moment. Sombre with intent, all her previously scattered powers of attention focused, Alison opened the book again but, this time, she began to read it.

 

Anyone with a television has seen a thousand Nazis. All Alison's life, they had jackbooted across the screen. Their omnipresence only made them seem like cartoons. They had long ago ceased to inspire shock or dread. The imagery of terror, mundane and commonplace.

Now, reading, she understood something about television that had not occurred to her before: that it pushed you only so
far, lest you turn it off. She had never seen a mobile gas chamber in a movie-of-the-week, or a baby picked up by the heels and smashed against the white trunk of a tree. No beards set aflame or gleeful rapes, no eager complicity of locals. No woman tied
by the hair to the tail of a horse and dragged to death.

How had she not known about these things, she wondered. Had she learned it in school and then forgotten?

At the beginning and the end of the book was a tableau of prisoner identification photos, each person shorn, in profile, straight on and turned three-quarters—women and men,
young and old, staring out, but holding back so much. She stud
ied each one carefully, searched eyes, pondered over profiles,
the angles of facial bones. At first she didn't realize that she was
looking for a resemblance, that she was looking for someone she knew. Alison was searching for Mrs. Soloff and when she thought she had found her in a young woman with bright and
fearless eyes, she continued looking, looking for Christian, too.

On the measled map of Europe, each red dot was a camp—a prison camp, a detention centre, a concentration camp. Sixty or a hundred people locked into boxcars for as long as ten days while the trains travelled along inconspicuous routes. No sanitation, no food, no fresh air. Many died. The ones who survived might have been glad to arrive.

Their luggage left on the platform, they were made to parade with the others past a camp doctor or SS officer who then signalled left or right. Those directed right went to work in munitions factories, mines, farms or rubber works, twelve
hours a day on starvation rations. On average, they lasted
three months. Those sent left, ninety per cent of every trainload, were gassed within an hour. If the barracks happened to be full, then everyone was gassed.

Mrs. Soloff went right and stood in line to be tattooed. Christian, small, deformed, marked for death, would have
gone left.

They undressed for the ‘showers', two thousand at a time, while an orchestra played selections from light opera. ‘Don't forget your soap and towel' read a sign. Only if someone panicked, noticing the lack of drains, were clubs and whips used to get them in the gas chambers. The door was bolted. A single consignment of Zyklon B filled as many as twenty trucks. At Birkenau the gas chambers ‘processed' five thousand corpses an hour.

Afterward, special commandos entered the chamber bearing the hooked poles used to prise apart the bodies. With ice tongs, they would have dragged Christian out, removed his gold teeth with pliers. And his luggage, left on the platform with Mrs. Soloff's, would have been sorted, catalogued, distributed. Gold, precious stones, currency, if they had any left, went to a special account at the Reichsbank, to pawn shops, the Swiss jewellery market, or into someone's pocket. Mrs. Soloff's silk underwear was sent as a wedding present to a blushing SS bride and Christian's corpse to the crematorium where, frequently, a foot or more of human fat had to be scraped off the chimney walls.

 

The next day, when she came into the back room for her break, it occurred to her that for the first time she and Malcolm had something in common. ‘What are you reading?' she asked.

He continued to the end of the line before closing the book around his finger. ‘Dante's
Inferno.'

She took her own book from her bag and opened it. ‘Ah,' he said, ‘Vorst has inspired you as well.'

‘I guess so,' she said and resumed reading where she had left off the night before.

‘Why did you think I didn't like Christian?' Malcolm asked.

She looked up at him, surprised, and, remembering the moment, reddened. ‘I shouldn't have said that.'

‘But you did.' It still bothered him immensely.

She had never noticed Malcolm's eyes before, dark with dark shadows underneath, and found now that she had to look away from them. The truth was he didn't seem to like any of them, but it would have been unkind to say that, so she just bit her lip. Then Donna stuck her head in the door and asked her to shampoo her client.

‘And Thi's wondering what you're doing. She says your break is over and you should be up front.'

Alison hurried off without answering Malcolm.

At the sink, she found a young man as agitated as she. ‘I
think my hair starting to fall out,' he said. ‘I think I'm going bald.'

She wrapped a towel round his neck. ‘There's not much you can do about it.'

‘I can't accept that.'

‘You adapt your hairstyle.'

‘Not if I don't have any hair.'

Alison told him, ‘There are worse things than going bald.'

‘Name one. Go on. Name one.'

‘Being in a concentration camp.'

‘Ha! I'd rather be in a concentration camp,' he said. ‘Then everybody would be bald.'

Alison stared at him until he said, ‘Kidding!'

Unsmiling, she eased him back in the chair, turned on the water, directed the nozzle over his crown. ‘I see what you mean,' she said after she had turned off the tap. ‘It's very thin on top.'