Legends of Our Time (6 page)

I put myself in his place: I think and dream like him. I am the one his wife will greet with love or rancor; the one who will drown my resentment in sleep or in solitary drinking; the one my friends betray and my subordinates detest; the one who has wasted my life and now it is too late to begin again.

Caught up in the game, I suddenly realize the passenger looks familiar. I have seen before that bald head, that hard chin, that thin nose. I have seen before that wrinkled forehead, those drooping ears. He turns around to glance outside, I see his neck: red, naked, enormous. I have seen that neck before. A shudder runs through me. It is no longer a matter of curiosity or game. The time
changes pace, country. The present is in the grip of all the years black and buried. Now I am glad I accepted the engagement for this evening, and that I decided against going by taxi.

The passenger does not suspect a thing. He has just lost his anonymity, returned to his prison, but he does not know it yet. Now that I have him, I will not let him get away again. What is he thinking about? Probably nothing. Thinking frightens him. Talking frightens him. Memories, words frighten him: that can be read on his lifeless face. This passenger, I am trying to place him, I know him; I used to practice that same defense myself. The best way to keep from attracting the executioner’s attention was not to see him. In order not to be noticed, you must murder imagination: dissolve, blend into the frightened mass, reduce yourself to an object. Go under in order to survive. But the man still does not realize my growing interest in him. Were a hundred of us looking him over, he would not notice any the more.

I leave my seat and stand up directly in front of him. I brush up against him, my knees touch his, but his eyes keep their distance. In a very low voice I say: “I think I know you.”

He does not hear. He is playing deaf, blind, dead. Just the way I used to do. He is taking refuge in absence, but tenaciously I track him. I repeat my sentence. Slowly, warily, he comes to life. He raises his tired eyes toward me.

“Were you speaking to me?”

“To you.”

“You were saying?”

“I think I have met you somewhere before.”

He shrugs his shoulders. “You’re mistaken, I don’t know you.”

The bus starts up, then stops again. I lean over the passenger, who is pretending to ignore me, as if the incident were closed. I admire him: he acts well, he does not
even blink. We are so close to one another that our breaths mingle, a drop of my sweat falls onto his shirt. He still does not react. If I were to slap him, he would say nothing. A matter of habit, of discipline. The lesson: conceal pain, because it excites the executioner much more than it appeases him. With me, this technique will not be of any help to him: I know the routine.

“You’re not from around here,” I say.

“Leave me alone.”

“You’re from somewhere else. From Europe.”

“You’re disturbing me. I’d appreciate it if you would stop pestering me.”

“But you interest me.”

“Too bad. You don’t interest me at all. I haven’t the slightest desire to talk or listen to you. Go back to your seat before I get angry. You hear me? Beat it!”

The tone of his voice startles me. For an instant, our glances meet. Nothing more is needed: I see myself twenty years ago, a tin plate in my hand, before this all-powerful master who was distributing the evening soup to a pack of starved corpses. My humiliation gives way to a somber joy which I can scarcely contain. According to the Talmud, only the mountains never meet: for the men who climb them, no circle is closed, no experience unique, no loss of memory definitive.

“I have some questions to ask you,” I say.

“I don’t give a damn about you or your questions.”

“Where were you during the war?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“In Europe—right?”

“Leave me alone.”

“In an occupied country, right?”

“Stop annoying me.”

“In Germany perhaps?”

The bus stops at last at a station and the man takes advantage of the opportunity: he leaps up and rushes toward the exit; I follow him.

“How odd, we’re getting off at the same place.”

He steps back quickly to let me pass. “I made a mistake, my stop is further on.”

I too pretend to step down and immediately turn back. “How odd, so is mine.”

We remain standing near the door. Two women have already taken our places.

“May I go on with our conversation?”

“I don’t know who you are or what you could want of me,” he says, his teeth clenched. “Your questions are uncalled for, your manners disagreeable and out of place. I don’t know what game you’re playing, but I refuse any part of it. You do not amuse me.”

“You don’t remember me. It is understandable. I’ve changed, I’ve grown up, I’ve gained weight, I’m better dressed, I feel well, I walk without fear of collapsing, I lack neither food nor friendship. What about you? How do you feel? Answer me, it interests me. Well, what do you say? No insomnia at night, no pangs of anxiety in the morning?”

Once again he takes shelter behind a mask of indifference, a state of non-being. He thinks himself secure, unattackable. But I pursue him relentlessly:

“Let’s start again, shall we? We’ve established your place of residence during the war: somewhere in Germany. Where, exactly? In a camp. Naturally. With other Jews. You are Jewish, aren’t you?”

He answers me with lips so thin they are almost nonexistent, in a tone which still has lost nothing of its assurance:

“Go to hell, I tell you. Shut up. There’s a limit to my patience. I would not like to cause a scene, but if you force me …”

I pay no attention to his threat. I know he will do nothing, he will not complain, he will not use his fists, not he, not here, not in public: he is more afraid than I of the police. So I proceed:

“What camp were you in? Come on, help me, it’s important. Let’s see: Buchenwald? No, Maidanek? No, not there either. Bergen-Belsen? Treblinka? Ponar? No, no. Auschwitz? Yes? Yes, Auschwitz. More precisely, in a camp which was part of Auschwitz, Javischowitz? Gleivitz? Monovitz? Yes, that’s it—there we are—Monovitz-Buna. Or am I mistaken?”

He performs well, he knows his lesson thoroughly. Not a shiver, not the slightest reaction. As if I weren’t speaking to him, as if my questions were addressed to someone else, dead a long time. Still, his efforts not to betray himself are becoming visible now. He controls his hands poorly, clasping and unclasping them; clenching his fingers which he hides behind his back.

“Let’s get down to specifics. What did you do there? You weren’t just a simple inmate? Not you. You are one of those who knew neither hunger nor weariness nor sickness. You are not one of those who lived in expectation of death, hoping it would not be too long in coming so that they could still die like men and not like unwanted beasts—unwanted even by death itself. Not you, you were head of a barracks, you had jurisdiction over the life and death of hundreds of human beings who never dared watch as you ate the dishes prepared specially for you. It was a sin, a crime of high treason, to catch you unawares during one of your meals. And what about now? Tell me, do you eat well? With appetite?”

He moistens his lips with his tongue. An almost imperceptible sigh escapes him. He has to redouble his efforts not to answer, not to take up the challenge. His muscles stiffen, he will not hold out much longer. The trap is closing on him, he is beginning to understand that.

“What about the barracks number? The seat of your kingdom? Do you remember it? Fifty-seven. Barracks fifty-seven. It was right in the center of the camp, two steps away from the gallows. I’ve a good memory, haven’t I? And you? Is your memory still alive? Or did it bury us all a second time?”

The conductor announces a stop; the barracks-chief does not move: it seems all the same to him. The door opens, a couple gets off, a young mother gets on pushing her little boy in front of her. The driver calls out, “Hey, lady, you owe me a
groosh
or a smile!” She gives him both. We start off again. My prisoner no longer notices: he has lost touch with reality. Outside is the city, so close, so unreal, the city with its lights and its sounds, its joys, its laughter, its hates, its furies, its futile intrigues; outside is freedom, forgetfulness if not forgiveness. At the next stop the prisoner could take flight. He will not, I am sure. He prefers to let me act, decide for him. I know what he is feeling: a mixture of fear, resignation, and also relief. He too has returned to the world of barbed wire: as in the past, he prefers anything whatsoever to the unknown. Here, in the bus, he knows what places him in jeopardy and that reassures him: he knows my face, my voice. To provoke a break would be to choose a danger the nature of which escapes him. In the camp, we settled into a situation this way and for as long as possible did anything to keep from changing it. We dreaded disturbances, surprises. Thus, with me, the accused knows where he stands: I speak to him without hate, almost without anger. In the street, the throng might not be so understanding. The country is bursting with former deportees who refuse to reason.

“Look at me. Do you remember me?”

He does not answer. Impassive, unyielding, he continues to look into the emptiness above the heads of the passengers, but I know his eyes and mine are seeing the same emaciated, exhausted bodies, the same lighted yard, the same scaffold.

“I was in your barracks. I used to tremble before you. You were the ally of evil, of hunger, of cruelty. I used to curse you.”

He still does not flinch. The law of the camp: make yourself invisible behind your own death mask. I whisper:
“My father was also in your barracks. But he didn’t curse you.”

Outside, the traffic starts to move, the driver picks up speed. Soon he will shout, “Last stop, everybody off!” I have passed my stop, no matter. The appointment no longer seems important. What am I going to do with my prisoner? Hand him over to the police? “Collaboration” is a crime punishable by law. Let someone else finish the interrogation. I shall appear as a witness for the prosecution. I have already attended several trials of this kind: a former Kapo, a former member of the
Judenrat
, a former ghetto policeman—all accused of having survived by choosing cowardice.

PROSECUTION:
“You have rejected your people, betrayed your brothers, given aid to the enemy.”

DEFENSE:
“We didn’t know, we couldn’t foresee what would happen. We thought we were doing the right thing, especially at the beginning; we hoped to alleviate the suffering of the community, especially during the first weeks. But then it was too late, we no longer had a choice, we couldn’t simply go back and declare ourselves victim among victims.”

PROSECUTION:
“In the Ghetto of Krilov, the Germans named a certain Ephraim to the post of president of the Jewish council. One day they demanded he submit a list of thirty persons for slave labor. He presented it to them with the same name written thirty times: his own. But you, to save your skin, you sold your soul.”

DEFENSE:
“Neither was worth very much. In the end, suffering shrinks them and obliterates them, not together but separately: there is a split on every level. Body and mind, heart and soul, take different directions; in this way, people die a dozen deaths even before resigning themselves or accepting a bargain with the devil, which is also a way of dying. I beg of you, therefore: do not judge the dead.”

PROSECUTION:
“You are forgetting the others, the innocent,
those who refused the bargain. Not to condemn the cowards is to wrong those whom they abandoned and sometimes sacrificed.”

DEFENSE:
“To judge without understanding is a power, not a virtue. You must understand that the accused, more alone and therefore more unhappy than the others, are also victims; more than the others, they need your indulgence, your generosity.”

I often left the courtroom depressed, disheartened, wavering between pity and shame. The prosecutor told the truth, so did the defense. Whether for the prosecution or for the defense, all witnesses were right. The verdict sounded just and yet a flagrant injustice emerged from these confused and painful trials; one had the impression that no one had told the truth, that the truth lay somewhere else—with the dead. And who knows if the truth did not die with them. I often used to think: “Luckily, I am witness and not judge: I would condemn myself.” Now I have become judge. Without wanting it, without expecting it. That is the trap: I am at the point where I cannot go back. I must pass sentence. From now on, whatever my attitude may be, it will have the weight of a verdict.

The smell of the sea rises to my nostrils, I hear the whisper of the waves, we are leaving the center of the city and its lights. We are coming to the end of the line. I must hurry and make a decision, try my former barracks-chief. I will take on all the roles: first, the witnesses, then the judge, then the attorney for the defense. Will the prisoner play only one role, the accused—the victim? Full powers will be conferred upon me, my sentence will be without appeal. Facing the accused, I will be God.

Let us begin at the beginning. With the customary questions. Last name, first name, occupation, age, address. The accused does not recognize the legitimacy of this procedure, or of the court; he refuses to take part in the trial. It is noted. His crimes are what interest us, not
his identity. Let us open the dossier, examine the charges leveled against him. Once again I see the scene of the crime, the uniform face of suffering; I hear the sound of the whip on emaciated bodies. At night, surrounded by his sturdy protégés, the accused shows he is skilled in doing two things at once: with one hand he distributes the soup, with the other he beats the inmates to impose silence. Whether the tears and moaning touch him or irritate him does not matter. He hits harder to make them stop. The sight of the sick enrages him: he senses in them a bad omen for himself. He is particularly cruel with the aged: “Why are you hanging on to this disgusting, filthy life? Hurry up and die, you won’t suffer anymore! Give your bread to the young, at least do one good deed before you croak!”