Time's Arrow (15 page)

The photograph of her I found in Rome, in the gardens of the monastery—I take it out and look at it. At night my eyes are full of tears. By day I throw myself into my work. I wonder if there will be any end to the sacrifices I am being asked to make.

—————

"Uncle Pepi" was everywhere. This being the thing that was most often said about him. For instance, "It's as if he's everywhere," or "The man seems to be everywhere," or, more simply, " 'Uncle Pepi' is everywhere." Omnipresence was only one of several attributes that tipped him over into the realm of the superhuman. He was also fantastically clean, for Auschwitz; when he was present, and he was present everywhere, I could sense the various cuts and nicks on my queasy jawline, my short but disobedient hair, the unhappy hang of my uniform, my lusterless black boots. His face was feline in shape, wide at the temples, and his blink was as slow as any cat's. On the ramp he cut a frankly glamorous figure, where he moved like a series of elegant decisions. You felt that he was only playing the part of a human being. Self-isolated as he was, "Uncle Pepi" nonetheless displayed the best kind of condescension, and was in fact unusually collegial—not so much with youngsters like myself, of course, but with more senior medical figures, like Thilo and Wirths. I was moreover privileged—and on something like a regular basis—to assist "Uncle Pepi" in Room 1 on Block 20 and later in Block 10 itself.

I recognized Room 1 from my dreams. The pink rubber apron on its hook, the instrument bowls and thermoses, the bloody cotton, the half-pint hypodermic with its foot-long needle. This is the room, I had thought, where something mortal would be miserably decided. But dreams are playful, and love to tease and poke fun at the truth. . . . Already showing signs of life, patients were brought in one by one from the pile next door and wedged onto the chair in Room 1, which looked like what it was, a laboratory in the Hygienic Institute, a world of bubbles and bottles. With the syringe there were two ways to go, intravenous and cardia ,

"Uncle Pepi" tending to champion the latter as more efficient and humane. We did both. Cardiac: the patient blindfolded with a towel, his right hand placed in the mouth to stifle his own whimpers, the needle eased into the dramatic furrow of the fifth rib space. Intravenous: the patient with his forearm on the support table, the rubber tourniquet, the visible vein, the needle, the judicious dab of alcohol. "Uncle Pepi" was then sometimes obliged to bring them to their senses with a few slaps about the face. The corpses were pink and blue-bruised. Death was pink but yellowish, and contained in a glass cylinder labeled
Phenol.
A day of that and you stroll out in your white coat and black boots, with the familiar headache and the plangent perfecto and the breakfast tannic gathering in your throat, and the eastward sky looked like phenol.

He led. We followed. Phenol work became absolutely routine. All of us did it the whole time. It wasn't until later that I saw what "Uncle Pepi" was capable of, in Block 10.

My wife Herta paid her first visit to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944, which was perhaps unfortunate: we were then doing the Hungarian Jews, and at an incredible rate, something like ten thousand a day. Unfortunate, because I was on ramp duty practically every night, finding the work somewhat impersonal too, the
selections
now being made by loudspeaker (such was the weight of traffic), and having little to do but stand there drinking and shouting with my colleagues—thus denying Herta the kind of undivided attention that every young wife craves. . . . Wait. Let me go at this another way.

Everything was ready for her. Thoughtful as ever, Dr. Wirths had made available the annex of his own living quarters— a delightful apartment (with its own kitchen and bathroom) beyond whose patterned lace curtains stood a high whi e

fence. Beyond that, unseen, the benign cacophony of the Kat-Zet . . . Dr. Wirths has his wife and three children with him, at present. I hoped that Herta would spend some of her time playing with the little Wirthses. Though that might touch on a sensitive subject. ... I was sitting on the sofa, quietly crying; I think I was wishing that Auschwitz looked better than it did, just now, with its windless heat and plagues of flies homing in on the marshes. As I heard the staff car approach I wandered out into the pale brown of the front garden. What did I expect? The familiar awkwardness, I suppose. Reproaches, accusations, sadness—perhaps even feeble blows from feeble fists. All to be at least partly resolved, that first night, in the act of love. Or certainly the second. That's how these things
usually
begin. What I didn't expect was a statement of truth. The truth was the last thing I was ready for. I should have known. The world, after all, here in Auschwitz, has a new habit. It makes sense.

The driver looked on sentimentally as she alighted from the car and made her way down the path. Then she turned to confront me. She looked nothing like her photograph. The girl in the photograph, whose face was clear.

"You are a stranger to me," she said.
Fremder:
stranger.

"Please," I said. "Please. My darling."
Bitte. Liebling.

"I don't know you," she said.
Ich kenne dich nicht.

Herta kept her head down as I helped her off with her coat. And something enveloped me, something that was all ready for my measurements, like a suit or a uniform, over and above what I wore, and lined with grief.

Her shyness proved impregnable. We lunched quietly, indeed wordlessly, on the fluidal sausages. Herta was all thumbs with the heavy cutlery and the Swedish glassware. When the servants left, she went and sat on the sofa a d

stared at the attractive rug. I joined her. She proved immune to my light-headed but rather leaden gallantries, the words so hard to shift around. Actually I felt far from well myself. And worse and worse as the morning wore on. And then entirely terrible, after a convulsive visit to the small but resonant bathroom, whose greasy air was full of racing currents, fire-tinged. I betook myself to bed in some exasperation, and without really bothering to get undressed. When I awoke around four A.M., still in my boots, she was lying beside me, entombed in her woolen nightgown, and fiercely whispering,
Nein. Nie. Nie.
Never. Never. No amount of caresses or endearments (or good-hearted raillery) seemed likely to soften her. I got out of bed—gah!—and then picked myself up off the floor. Herta was now fast asleep. I remember thinking how white and cold and still her face looked, without the breeze of thought or sentience, as I stumbled off to the tumult of the ramp.

Ours was a human enterprise, but the animal kingdom played its part in the new order of being. Cartfuls of corpses were shoved from the burial pits by mules and oxen, and stupidly, with no animal comment. Cows did not look up from their grazing, their indifference seeming to say,
This is all right. This need not be remarked,
as if it wasn't unusual to conjure a multitude from the sky above the river. We kept rabbits, too, in much the same way as we dealt with the people, improvisationally and with desperate brilliance. Men gave up the very linings of their greatcoats to provide the little creatures with fur. And then of course there were the dogs, boxers, their crushed faces, their squat coats bearing the ubiquitous sign of the twisted cross, in honor of the Jews they healed with their teeth and with the snort and quiver of their jaws.

In the clubroom I am told (I think I've got this right): Jews come from monkeys (from
Menschenafferì),
as do Slavs and so on. Germans, on the other hand, have been preserved in ice from the beginning of time in the lost continent of Atlantis. This is good to know. A meteorology division in the
Ahnenerbe
has been looking into it. Officially these scientists are working on long-range weather predictions; in fact, though, they are seeking to prove the cosmic-ice theory once and for all.

It sounds familiar. Atlantis . . . twins and dwarves. The
Ahnenerbe
is a department of the
Schutzstaffel. Schutzstaffel:
Defense Force.
Ahnenerbe:
Ancestral Heritage. It is from the
Ahnenerbe
that "Uncle Pepi" is sent his skulls and bones.

I am, of course, no stranger to feminine wiles. But I was disappointed, I was very disappointed, when the second night with Herta went no better than the first. Went no different, in fact. Will nothing "melt the ice"—the cosmic ice of marriage? The idea of a gradual familiarization was not without its initial appeal. But surely, I thought, on the third and final night, which we were to have all to ourselves . . .

Herta's nightdress is childish. It is patterned with genies and sprites. I begged of them, these sprites and genies. Deliriously, all night, in bed, I begged—oh, the bedbug of nightbeg . . . There were periods, earlier on, when I was calmer and we could talk a little. She spoke tearfully of
das Baby;
and the baby does sound fairly disastrous. I also got the distinct impression that Herta disapproves of the work I am doing here. In her incensed whisper she called me names I didn't understand. They made her face ugly, even in the dark. Why can't I answer?

The next day she was gone and the next night I w s

back on the ramp. Playing Cupid. I still don't know what my wife looks like. She never met my eye. No. I never met hers. Things will improve. She will come around, in time. Has someone been telling her what I did to the bald whores?

Out on the ramp beneath the lights and the arrows of rain and the madhouse tannoy squawking
links
and
rechts:
fathers, mothers, children, the old, scattered like leaves in the wind.
Die . . . die Auseinandergeschrieben.
And I had a thought that made my whole body thrill with shame. Because the trains are endless and infernal, and because the wind feels like the wind of death, and because life is life (and love is love) but no one said it was easy.

I thought: It's all right for some.

With the war going so well now, and with the perceptible decline in the workload after the feats of '44, and with the general burgeoning of confidence and well-being, why, your camp doctor is agreeably surprised to find time and leisure to pursue his hobbies. The troglodytic Soviets have been driven back into their frozen potholes: the camp doctor steadies his monocle and reaches for his mustiest textbook. Or his binoculars and shooting stick. Whatever. Depending on natural bent. Winter was cold but autumn is come—the stubble fields, and so on. The simpering Vistula. Never before have I seen lice by the bushel. Some of the patients look as though they have been showered with poppy seeds. Good morning to you,
Scheissminister!
In one of her baffling letters Herta goes so far as to question the
legality
of the work we are doing here. Well. Let me see ... I suppose you could say that there are one or two "gray areas." Block 11, the Black Wall, the measures of the Political Unit: these excite lively controversy. And there's certainly no end of a palaver when a patient "takes matters into his own hands,"

with the electrified fence, for example. We all
hate
that . . . I am famed for my quiet dedication. The other doctors disappear for weeks on end; but in the summer air of the Kat-Zet I have no need of
Sommerfrische.
I do love the feel of the sun on my face, it's true. "Uncle Pepi" has surpassed himself with his new laboratory: the marble table, the nickel taps, the bloodstained porcelain sinks. Provincial:
that's
the word for Herta. You know, of course, that she doesn't shave her legs? It's true. About the armpits one can eternally argue, but the legs—surely!—the legs ... In this new lab of his he can knock together a human being out of the unlikeliest odds and ends. On his desk he had a box full of eyes. It was not uncommon to see him slipping out of his darkroom carrying a head partly wrapped in old newspaper: evidently, we now rule Rome. The next thing you knew, there'd be, oh, I don't know, a fifteen-year-old Pole sliding off the table and rubbing his eyes and sauntering back to work, accompanied by an orderly and his understanding smile. We measure twins together, "Uncle Pepi" and I, for hours and hours: measure measure measure. Even the most skeletal patients thrust their chests out for medical inspection in the last block on the right: a scant fifteen minutes earlier they were flat on the floor of the
Inhalationsraume.
It would be criminal—it would be criminal to
neglect
the opportunity that Auschwitz affords for the furtherance ... I see him at the wheel of his Mercedes-Benz, on the day the gypsy camp was established, personally ferrying the children from "the central hospital." The gypsy camp, its rosy pinks, its dirty prettiness. " 'Uncle Pepi'!" " 'Uncle Pepi'!" the children cried. When was that? When did we do the gypsy camp? Before the Czech family camp? Yes. Oh, long ago. Herta came again. Her second visit could not be accounted a complete success, though we were much more intimate than before, and wept a l t

together about the baby. As to the so-called "experimental" operations of "Uncle Pepi":
he
had a success rate that approached—and quite possibly attained—100 percent. A shockingly inflamed eyeball at once rectified by a single injection. Innumerable ovaries and testes seamlessly grafted into place. Women went out of that lab looking twenty years younger. We can make another baby, Herta and I. If I wept copiously both before and after, she let me do it, or try it, but I am impotent and don't even go to the whores anymore. I have no power. I am completely helpless. The sweet smell here, the sweet smell, and the dazzled Jews. "Uncle Pepi" never left any scars. You know, it isn't all sweetness and light here, not by any manner of means.
Some of the patients were doctors.
And it wasn't long before they were up to their old tricks. I am prominent in the campaign against this filth. The baby will be here soon and I feel very concerned. "Uncle Pepi" is right: I do need a holiday. But my visit to Berlin for the funeral turns out be mercifully brief: I only remember the drizzling parquetry of the streets, the shop-lights like the valves of an old radio, the drenched churchyard, the skin and weight problems of the young cleric, Herta's parents, Herta's hideous face. There is a war on, I keep telling everyone. We are in the front line. What are we fighting? Phenol? On my return from Berlin to the light and space of the KZ,
what should await me but a telegram. The baby is very weak, and the doctors have done all they can. The casket was about fifteen by twenty inches. I am fighting the phenol war, and thanklessly. No one shows me any gratitude. I seem to have developed a respiratory difficulty— stress asthma, perhaps—particularly when I am shouting. I have to shout. The pits are bursting. In the Sprinkleroom, when the guards touch the young girls, and I repeatedly register my objections, the men mime the playing of violins.