Kapo, p.21
Kapo, page 21
Or could they? He’d never thought about it. Why hadn’t they simply slaughtered, straight off? Why, instead of building real slaughterhouses with drains for the blood and grinders for the flesh and bones, had they put up fences around fields, where blood and flesh and bones, mountains of them, would be slowly ground by starvation and exhaustion?
Here was a chink in their resolve, an inconsistency. Why? Had they been divided into bad and good? Hypocritical and honest? Into those who believed that other origins and views should simply be punished, and those who had sworn to drain the blood of all who were different?
Disciplinarians and butchers! He had known both kinds, and a third kind, in which disciplinarian and butcher were combined. Gruppenführer Leitner, who arrived at the head of the rumbling trucks in his open car and stood in front of the barracks, barking commands as he directed the human freight, making sure not an inch of truck bed went unused before he raised his gloved hand and gave the signal for the column to start for the crematorium. And Pfalzig, who killed prisoners by knocking them to the ground, then pressing with the full weight of his body the end of his staff into their mouths and down their windpipes. And Schranke and Riegler, Blažuj and Jozo. He could analyze the types, see what motivated them.
But that was a chink in psychology only, not principle. Perhaps the difference lay, rather, in the variety of circumstances, some camps having room only for a tenth of the people sent to them, while others could accommodate all. However, he never found out why some were sent to one camp and some to another, nor did he read about this in the books that became available just after the war. But the chink existed, and perhaps it had caused the Germans to lose the war. For if they had simply slaughtered, they wouldn’t have needed Kapos, and if there had been no Kapos, no one would have softened them up with gifts, gifts that required something in return, some little inequity, a blind eye to the pilfering of food, cigarettes, the lending out of the key to the abandoned toolshed, where hungry young female prisoners could be forced to lie down on the rolled-out mat acquired from the corpse carriers.
One corruption in exchange for another, and this infiltrated their blood, and infiltrated, through them, through the packages sent home, the blood of their loved ones, softening the spine of the German will. Gabelić had correctly assessed the situation when he used his knife on Maričić. Lamian agreed with Gabelić. What the Germans should have done was slaughter, not put up fences. Slaughter, not sap their strength on dikes and construction. Slaughter, not reduce rations. Slaughter, not stand the prisoners in ranks and beat them. Slaughter, only slaughter. Slaughter, slaughter, slaughter.
In the end, the whole earth would be drenched in blood, covered with corpses and ashes. The grass would no longer grow because of all the ashes and blood, nor would grain. Animals and people would have nothing to eat, they would drop in the trenches where they’d been sent, and rot, and their rottenness would pollute the water and poison the air; and the ones sent to bury and burn them would fall on top of them, poisoned, and so would those who came to take their place at tools and arms, and so would those who came as victors to plant their flag over the dead.
Everything would die; this whole sinful world devoted only to itself, bent on impurity. Everything that was murky and deceitful, that succumbed to the temptations of possession, to luxury, the intellect, art, imagination, meditation, discovery, assimilation—everything, in short, the world’s Jews had used to dazzle and corrupt.
HE WAS DISTRACTED BY MUSIC AND SONG. IT CAME FROM the playground, where the children had been running a moment before. They now stood transfixed around a hairy, bearded young man in blue jeans and checked shirt; he was plucking a guitar slung across his chest.
The guitar strings twanged loud and lively, while an invisible drum beat out the rhythm to the shivering clang of cymbals, and from the mouth of the young man a deep, pleasant voice joined the instruments and flowed like water in a river. The singer stood straight, and as his hands roamed the strings, his legs jerked, first one and then the other, in time with the drum and the cymbals.
Lamian, noticing objects bobbing behind the young man’s thick, curly head of hair and above his shoulders, which were covered with straps, began to circle the playground, where people were now gathering from various directions, and he found himself behind the young man. The bobbing objects were two copper plates on leather thongs and two bells on iron rods. Firmly fixed to the player’s waist was a drum that was struck by a small wooden mallet connected to a metal lever and a taut wire, struck every time the musician’s right leg jerked back. At a jerk of the left leg, the cymbals came together, and at a shake of the shoulders the bells twitched and jingled. All this noise was embraced and made one by the song the bearded young man sang from deep inside his chest.
At first Lamian found the song incomprehensible, but he soon caught a few English words he had heard before, “love,” “heart,” “summer,” “dreams,” and concluded it was English, perhaps American, a cowboy song or else an imitation like those he often heard young people singing on television, young people of various nationalities, even Yugoslav.
This singer, however, was unique, for in addition to his song he provided the accompaniment of an entire band. He was an innovator, a wonder of a man. Lamian continued to circle around him, observed him from the side and from the front, looked at his swarthy face, his short, curved nose and two small eyes buried in late afternoon shadow. An ordinary face, but to Lamian it seemed a mask, a mask that covered something extraordinary. He liked him; he was impressed. And felt, through him, a sense of freedom. The man’s own, because he had so obviously succeeded in freeing himself from the trap of usual professions.
Now the singer finished his song, but still ran his fingers over the strings forcefully, rapidly, then rapped the wood of the guitar as the unseen mallet hit the drum and the cymbals clashed. To make all three finishing strokes come as close together as possible, he had to jump into the air and kick back both legs. This amused the crowd, and they laughed. The children imitated him by jumping up and down. For a moment it looked as if the performance would degenerate into individual productions, but then the singer again brought his feet together, straightened, and with a broad, flailing movement of his right hand announced the beginning of a new song.
It was slower, a drawn-out song full of yearning; the bells, shaken by the man’s trembling shoulders, imbued it with pathos, while the drum, alternating with the cymbals, played with muted ceremony. Something inconsolably sad was being communicated, filling the space between the uniform multistory buildings with something that concerned them: love not returned, promises broken, hopes lost.
The complaints of a full stomach! But there was no other kind of song. Even when marching out to work from which many would not return, they sang—at the command of the Arbeitsführer, it was true—the same sort of full-stomach song: about flowers in the meadow, sweethearts waiting back home. Even the camp marching song, “In Auschwitz war ich so manchen Monat, so manches Jahr” composed by a nameless inmate, wasn’t free of such sentimentality, since both the slaves and their drivers longed for a home somewhere, for reunion, for someone close, a bond between man and woman. The wirefenced fields, with which the warriors marked the progress of their conquest, thus degenerated from an emblem of purification by death to an emblem of love-making. The SS officers and noncoms, even the camp commandant, had lovers among the better-fleshed women prisoners, and Blažuj herded the Gypsies into the officers’ canteen to play love songs for him before he slaughtered them, so that hundreds of musicians left not only violins and drums on the grounds of the camp—along with their clothing and the gold pieces sewn inside, target of Sergeant Major Maričić’s searches—but also the strains of their sobbing songs.
Parallel yearnings: the embrace of both butcher and lover, rule and anarchy, the abandonment to will and tears alike. And this free, late-afternoon singer, this inventor and virtuoso, were he to fall into their hands with his panoply of instruments, they would station him at the camp gate to see off the work teams with a march tempo of drums and cymbals—and afterward would send him, weak from hunger and disease, to get an injection of phenol, and replace him with others, perhaps with a whole orchestra.
They would do it with regret, shaking their heads as they recalled his marvelous artistic feats, the remarkable coordination with which he had used the various parts of his body. What a fellow! What a Kerl! A shame he didn’t last longer, a shame he didn’t have enough food to eat or warm clothing to wear, a shame his strength and resistance were sapped by bloody diarrhea.
But this musician didn’t have to worry, because in his pocket he carried a legitimate passport and a permit to perform in public places, in this playground surrounded not by barbed wire but apartment buildings in which yearnings were satisfied within four solid walls, well-heated rooms with full pantries and refrigerators, the family circle. The spanking of children’s bottoms, husband-wife quarrels, grumbling about in-laws who take up space and parents who squelch all flights of fancy.
Then Lamian remembered the weedy young man at the café, the one who had sat silently opposite the Jew (if he was a Jew). That man would be capable of rising above the sweetness of this early evening romanticism; he would jam his hands in the pockets of his tight pants, thrust out his narrow chest with the thin, tightly knotted necktie down the center, throw back his bony head, and yell, “Beat it!” And bend down to pick up a rock, and hurl it at the singer, right in the middle of that delirious guitar.
What an uproar then! Would the attacker find any allies? Or would everyone turn on him for spoiling their fun? Perhaps there would be two camps slugging it out while the singer took to his heels. Perhaps he would never again put on those drums and cymbals all hooked up with wires, those bells on metal rods, seeing how extremely foolish he had been to place himself like that in front of strange people, bloodthirsty people.
For the time being, however, he was rocking and shaking, kicking back one foot, the other, rounding his mouth between curly mustache and beard, drawing out the notes then cutting them off with bangs and jingles, all in a passion that seemed to come from fever or pain. As if a hunger deep inside him was rattling its chains, a hunger that had grown dense in its emptiness over the years and now wailed, wailed inside Lamian too, ready to burst from his mouth, so that he had to press his lips together. The duo of L&L, he thought, recalling Helena Lifka, who for a long time now, for hours, had so magnanimously absented herself from his mind. That branded, bluish face, the lips pressed together in a silence which only hunger, forced hunger, imposed hunger, could open in song.
The two of them would be beaten, he was sure, even without the sour young man from the café. The residents of these new buildings loved too much the comfort they had never known before, the cozy rooms they had forsaken briefly to see and hear the singer up close, rooms to which they would return, where they were mellowed by the proximity of their children, who twined themselves around their legs after safe play. The residents would shrink from the duo, whistle their disapproval, stone them because the singers had violated the pact about songs—that they be free of truth, free of hunger—and this had been observed even in the marching songs composed in the crush of the barracks and the stench of the latrines.
The pact proved stronger than hunger; he saw this in the singer’s confident movements, the manipulation of body, wires, and rods, in the dignified strum of fingers over strings, and in the tender song that came from those rounded lips between curly mustache and beard, rising into the free air between the multistory buildings built in place of the homes that had been destroyed. And somewhere up there, near the distant roofs, nightmare presence from the booted kick in Lamian’s side to the knife that plunged into the throat of Sergeant Major Maričić, leered Zvonko Gabelić.
ON THE WAY BACK, THE MEMORY OF THE CAFÉ MADE HIM wary of unfamiliar places to eat. It was only in the dining room of his hotel that he finally got a proper meal. Afterward, he sat back and contentedly watched others eat and drink.
They were probably also guests of the hotel, and strangers in Zagreb, for they sat separately, each at his own table, shoveling in the food. Unlike Lamian, no one sat awhile after eating. One couple, perhaps husband and wife, or accountants attending the same convention, left as soon as they paid. For an hour and a half, quite a number of people filed past, many more than the room with its ten or so tables would have indicated at first glance.
In addition to the man and woman who looked like accountants there was a bald, heavyset man of fifty in a dark blue suit. His face grew redder and more worried with each bite; more and more frequently he brought his large hand to his mouth to cover a hiccup or belch. Then he would stop chewing and look at that hand, as if it bore the symptoms of an illness he suspected. There were two young officials who conversed in monosyllables without looking at each other, merely nodding to signal that they had heard and understood. And two women, an aunt and her niece, or a mother and her son’s young wife, perhaps on a visit to the son serving in the army. They were reserved, both spinsterishly neat, carefully combed, with handbags on the table, from which they took a tissue, a billfold, a page with writing—a certificate of some sort or maybe a shopping list. There was a blond beauty in a honey-colored dress with a plunging neckline; at once sensual and shy, she had heavy, lashless eyelids that were always lowered. There was a thin girl in blue jeans and a sweater buttoned all the way to her angular chin, her hair tightly curled, almost kinky; she smoked between courses and at intervals asked the waiter for condiments, toothpicks, additional cutlery. There was a well-groomed old man, gray hair slicked down and parted; his movements were slow, and he chewed each mouthful laboriously, reflectively, pushing around the food on his plate more than eating. And a woman in a black suit, with thick dark hair and a face like a full moon, her large teeth protruding. She kept turning toward the door, as if waiting for someone, yet left as soon as she had eaten and paid.
Ordinary people, but he observed them with a dissecting eye. Everything about them interested him, every gesture, every remark, every expression and movement of face, hand, or shoulder. He felt a need to engross himself in them, to follow the way they took in food and with what degree of urgency before washing it down with soothing beverages. Their fullness meant more to him than his own. As if he had come to this restaurant not to eat but to see how others ate. The curiosity of a man long unaccustomed to being among people, or, rather, of a man who has been interested not in people but only in the picture they have of him, for fear he might be discovered.
Now he no longer feared discovery; he was only watching, detached, and this new state of mind pleased him so much that he didn’t want to let go of it. He remained sitting even after the diners had thinned out and the only ones left were the old man with the part in the middle and another guest. Short, with reddish hair and restless dark eyes, the man had stormed into the dining room like a cannonball and sat at the first table, by the door, so that Lamian could not hear what he ordered. It was soup—the man used a spoon. He ate quickly, paid, and rushed out at almost the same time that the old man was making a sedate exit.
A little mineral water still sparkled in Lamian’s glass, but he did not drink it. He sat on. He no longer had anyone to look at, only the two waiters in the deserted dining room, one older, stooped, leaning on a chair, the other somewhat younger but also tired. They were talking. He watched them with no less interest than when they had danced attendance on the room, gliding from table to table, taking orders or bringing food.
Now the tables were empty. A few still had uncleared plates and silverware, napkins unfolded and abandoned, like scattered white roofs.
Roofs with no one beneath them. It was winter, and the snow had settled on both the roofs and the roads connecting them, and since the animals and people were all dead, the white layer remained untouched. In places, a bulge where the snow covered some forgotten object and copied its shape. The Ukrainian children’s ball, which they had not taken with them, surprised by the truck that came for them. The little girl’s doll, which she had dropped when the bullet entered her brain and which the corpse bearers had not picked up, knowing it wouldn’t buy food or cigarettes, because with the disappearance of the children the doll had become an article without a buyer.
Not a buyer anywhere, just the two corpse bearers dressed in black, talking in a corner, left by accident after the destruction of the camp, forgotten by the SS, who should have liquidated them as unwanted witnesses but hadn’t, because the order to withdraw came too suddenly and too late. As at Auschwitz. But not at Jasenovac, where all the witnesses were killed.
Here, however, two were left alive, and they were now discussing what they had seen and done. The loads of corpses they had taken to the crematorium. Multiplying the number of loads by the number of bodies in each. At the beginning they had put fewer on the litter—two, three at the most—but when the turn came for the thinnest among them, the toughest, those who had managed to keep alive even at seventy-five pounds, the number rose to four. How easily we tossed them on top of each other! How light they were, how thin their limbs, so thin you could get thumb and forefinger around them. They wasted away and died silently, as they stood at roll call or sitting with mess tins in their laps, staring with brows furrowed, unable to eat the soup which might have kept them alive.
It was just a dream, his and Riegler’s, that in the end only the two of them would be alive, forgotten, left behind with their gold and secret supply of food. That they would relax at last, talk, roar with laughter at the end of the world that had missed them.
