Kapo, p.22
Kapo, page 22
The waiters were laughing. The older one was snapping the end of a napkin against the edge of a table, or maybe it was at the shoulders of the younger waiter, who stood beside him, erect, face tight—he had obviously introduced the joke, the occasion for laughter, into the conversation, and knew better than to spoil it by being the first to laugh.
Then they separated, one to the left, the other to the right. At the door the older waiter raised his hand to the switch and turned the lights off, on, and a second time. A signal that Lamian, the last customer, had to go. But Lamian didn’t go right away. He wanted to stay, to ask them to pay no attention to him, to turn off the lights and leave. He would remain in the dark, with perhaps a little light from the lobby or street catching the white tablecloths amid the sea of shadows. He would sit and think of what he and Riegler would have done had they been left alone with the gold and hoarded food, around them the dead and half-dead rotting in the barracks. Would the two of them have murdered each other?
But the lights blinked again. Now it was the younger waiter giving the signal to leave, looking sternly at Lamian and keeping a finger on the switch as if threatening a third flick which would turn loose the German shepherds. Lamian gathered up his things—cigarettes, matches, the glasses case he had absentmindedly taken out—and made his way out of the dining room, stiff and numb from sitting.
THE LOBBY WAS DIM, LIKE THE DIMNESS HE HAD JUST wished for in the dining room. He found a vacant table—a shining plate of glass that floated in a pit of black—and groped for a chair and sat down. He was alone, near a pillar that branched at the top into two arches. In the faint light of the reception desk he could see, at a distant table, the silhouettes of several figures.
He liked the muted lighting in which you could still see people, after the white desolate glare of the searchlight from the watchtower as it slid across the barracks window. You were in your cubicle, hidden, hoping that the beam wasn’t hunting you, that the SS would not burst in with their dogs, drag you out and into another barracks, where there was a chair set in the middle of the concrete floor and a nurse in a rubber apron ready to put an injection into your heart.
He remembered sitting like this on some other occasion, in a half-lit room with glassy surfaces and silhouettes huddled around them.
Where had it been? Perhaps the scene came to him only from a story, someone else’s, or from a film, it was so vivid and so unusual. But searching deeper in the darkness of his mind, he realized that he had experienced it in the lobby of another hotel, in another city.
When? He went back through the darkness to last summer in Banja Luka, and fastened on Subotica. Which was where he had taken up the trail of Helena Lifka.
He remembered how for a brief moment, at that other table and in that other gloom, he had allowed himself to hope. And now, too, he was giving shape to that hope—in the softness of the armchair, the human silhouettes, the night owl’s atmosphere of cigarette smoke and quiet conversation. His desire to immerse himself in this world. But the thought of going back to Banja Luka sobered him.
Banja Luka had been a mistake from the start, a loathsome place, and not only on his return, which as punishment for being alive had thrust him into the oven of summer headfirst, as he had thrust others into the ovens, and from this he had tried to deliver himself by the wire attached to the stove. It was a pit, with mountains all around, fencing it in with fear. Liberated from one camp, he had chosen another, just as a mole driven from one hole seeks another where the air is equally humid and close.
He had chosen that sleepy town among the mountains as a place to wait, peering out, for the hand of revenge sooner or later to clap down on him. Hiding, pulling into himself, fattening his body to alter his appearance, keeping silent so his voice would not be recognized, squinting behind dark glasses. And he had taken up with a half-woman, a dried-up spinster, panting over her at each meeting but never letting a word out, not from his heart, stomach, or that tight little sausage which did nothing more than pump into her the poison of his pent secrecy and deceit. And he fled from the brave, beautiful Ella Cohen, who had appealed to him to leave those hills, leave behind silence and join her in equality and openness, as young men and women did on nights like this, in the shadows at low tables sparkling with drinks and thick with cigarette smoke, where promises and demands were exchanged in whispers, and no light fell on scenes of affection, doubt, shame, and hate. Here was not the loneliness of old age, whose only road was the distance from table to cupboard in a single room—on the contrary, all here was spacious, wide and deep, still unexplored and unknown, these nocturnal meeting places which filled up and emptied ceaselessly, always inviting new players into the darkness.
Now he sat in the darkness and enjoyed it. He lit a cigarette and by the flame of the match saw the glass contours of an ashtray. Into it he threw the extinguished match, its tip still glowing, a red point in the sea of ink that spread to the farthest arch and the table and shapes around it. This was the ink of the fields beyond the barbed wire, those inconceivable expanses where people still breathed, moved freely, tramping the roads and lying in the grass with their faces to the sky, hands clasped behind their heads, watching the clouds and thinking of what they would do tomorrow, where they would go, where they would resettle.
He was sitting in a short, two-wheeled cart, a kind he had never in his life sat in; it was only as a corpse bearer and gravedigger that he’d pushed a two-wheeler like that, or else had walked behind it as Kapo, flogging the men to go faster. But now a horse was harnessed in front, trotting, black in the darkness that hid its color, while he sat and looked at the animal’s rump as it bobbed and gleamed beneath a faint light, perhaps the distant moon behind clouds. All he had to do was sit, not even hold the reins, because the horse went by itself at a measured trot, the cart shaking so gently that it was like a child’s cart cut to the measure of his body and pushed by someone instead of pulled.
Then he was sitting in a baby carriage, and knew his mother was pushing it even though he couldn’t see her, because he felt her presence, her scent, something between the smell of risen dough and bed linen, mild but unmistakable. When he turned around to make sure it was his mother, the movement hurt his neck, and the baby carriage tipped so much, he was afraid he would tumble out. He clutched the sides, and found he was gripping the soft arms of his chair and that his fingertips were being burned. It was his cigarette, which he quickly moved up between his fingers so it wouldn’t slip to the floor. He had fallen asleep.
Amusing, but only to him, because no one else was near. At the neighboring pillar the figures sat leaning toward one another. The cigarette still in his hand, he knocked off the ash and inhaled from it before putting it out.
The two people leaning toward each other now straightened, neck and shoulders first, and as they stood, Lamian saw that they were man and woman, both young. They left the part of the lobby visible to him. Gone to bed, having looked raptly in each other’s eyes as they sat together, eyes that gave them the desire to kiss and couple.
And Lamian should go to bed himself, though for the moment he didn’t feel, tired. But sleep would be welcome after last night’s vigil. He got up and walked in the same direction, taking care not to bump into the chairs.
At the reception desk, the clerk—the same one he had dealt with several times that day—bowed with a look of recognition, took the key from the hook in its pigeonhole, and handed it to him without a word. Lamian took the key and started toward the stairs. He heard music. It grew louder as he went forward, and when he reached the stairs, he saw that it was coming not from above, where he was going, but from below. He hadn’t noticed before that the stairs also went down, but now, in the evening, they were illuminated, and even more than the stairs leading up.
Stopping to listen to the music, he concluded that it was being played for entertainment, and that possibly the young couple had gone down there. The idea of finding out, or simply doing what they had done—he could not distinguish between the two—appealed to him, so he descended the lighted stairway.
THE STAIRS TURNED ONCE, TWICE, AND THE SOUND swelled more and more powerfully, like water rising from his feet to his head. He came to a wall in which two green plush curtains parted to a reddish gloom and the music. He found himself on the threshold of a low, rectangular room, a band at one end and people sitting along a bar at the other.
Actually, only one man sat at the bar, his naked skull gleaming beneath the red lights; there was no one at the tables which went all the way to the music stand, so that the efforts of the three-piece band—saxophone, piano, drums—could not reduce the sense of desolation.
Lamian was about to turn and leave, when a tall waiter with slickly combed hair detached himself from the darkness by the wall. With a bow and a broad sweep of his arm he invited Lamian to have a seat at whichever table he pleased.
Lamian, not wanting to but acceding to the forceful style of this invitation, went over to the bar, the row of backless stools, and since the sole patron was sitting at the far right, he took one of the stools to the left and climbed carefully onto it. Because there was no back, he had to lean on the bar, and almost bumped heads with the second waiter, a reassuringly wrinkled and weary man, who approached from the rear of the bar and its shelves of bottles.
“What’ll you have?” the waiter asked in a growling whisper, leaning forward to wipe the dark surface of the counter that glistened between himself and Lamian. “Something light? Whiskey and soda, a gin fizz?” Lamian muttered that he’d have a fizz. The waiter nodded slightly and turned to the shelves. Swaying his large behind and the short red tailcoat that hung over it, he located bottles and opened them, filled a glass and shoved it toward Lamian.
Lamian took a swallow and looked around. The tables were still unoccupied, the first waiter nowhere to be seen, and when he turned back to the bar, he saw the same thing, for above the shelves of bottles was a mirror the length of the wall. Like a television screen, it gave him a view of the entire room, and at the same time he could watch the waiter busy in front of him, then going over to the customer on the right and talking to him. But this wide, duplicate scene, unlike the more meager one in the lobby, made Lamian uncomfortable: here he was too much a part of things, practically a participant.
He sensed—sensed only, for this was his first time in a bar, not counting a couple of brief visits to a nightclub, also here in Zagreb, but long ago, before the war, somewhere around Jelačić Square—that demands would be made of him in this place of a subterranean red gloom that resembled hell, but a heavenly hell, where music played and powerful but enticing drinks were served. Where the customer had to conduct himself like a spendthrift, an adventurer. This was alien to Lamian; that was why he fled that nightclub of the past, whose name he no longer remembered, when he was taken there by two students from his class, who revealed to him only after they had entered and sat down at a table, in a darkness similar to this, that they were there to find women of pleasure. At the time he was already torn in his desires between Branka and Zita, so he left the company the moment three garishly made-up women gathered around their table and his companions began introducing themselves and coming to terms.
Out he ran into the chill air of the street, having excused himself with some pressing obligation he just remembered. Even now he could feel the relief that came over him then, recalled it more clearly than anything that had gone before, and he was convinced that he would breathe the same sigh of relief if he got down from this uncomfortable stool, paid for his drink, and left.
But before he could decide to do this—before he even had time to think of it, so intimidated was he by the nature of the place, though he had come alone and of his own volition—he saw in the mirror that a young woman had emerged from the darkness, and when he turned, he saw her directly. She was seating herself on the last stool to the left.
She had brown hair that fell long and wavy onto her shoulders; her breasts and figure were full; and she wore a simple dress with large black and white squares. Then she looked at him, and he saw her face: full and fleshy, with pale cheeks. Her eyes were not large, but clear. Their expression contained no curiosity; they slid over him without lingering, continued to the other side of the bar.
The waiter slowly came over, and Lamian saw him lean toward the woman with the same assured and encouraging manner which had filled him, Lamian, with a feeling of trust when he first sat down. But from the waiter’s conduct you could tell that the woman, unlike Lamian, was not a bored hotel guest, nor had she simply wandered in. He clearly recognized her, for he showed no sign of surprise, showed instead a measured solicitude, which could only mean that she too, by a secret understanding, was part of this place.
And she must have come with the knowledge that this place was for adventure and extravagance. Yet, judging by her appearance, she hadn’t the means—so the inescapable conclusion was that she expected her foray to bring her those means: in the form of someone else’s money. Like those three garish women four decades ago, she was a woman of pleasure, though this was contradicted by her pure, almost chaste face, her modest clothes, her forthright gaze.
The contradiction stirred Lamian’s curiosity, gave rise to both lascivious and protective feelings toward the woman, erasing, like the sweep of a hand across the counter, the irritation and mistrust of just a moment ago. Tensely, out of the corner of his eye, he watched the waiter serve her—a brownish-yellow drink in a thin-stemmed glass. At the same time, in the mirror, he noted the entrance of four new customers, one woman and three men. The music wasn’t playing then, but when the woman and men sat down at a table, the band struck up a new number, and one of the men went out into the empty space among the tables to dance with the woman, while the others conversed with the waiter who had come from behind the band.
This scene then became the background, blocked by the looming figure of the third man, who had left the table and was making for the bar. He stopped by the stool next to Lamian’s, between Lamian and the young woman.
He was thin, hollow-cheeked, with thick black hair combed back, but there were unruly tufts over his low forehead and temples. Going around the stool, he stood close to the bar, so Lamian couldn’t see the woman.
Now the waiter came over and looked inquiringly at the man. The man ordered a brandy, and when the waiter brought it, Lamian saw that this was the same thing the woman was drinking, in the same thin-stemmed glass. Perhaps the man had ordered it on purpose, to begin a conversation with the woman. And indeed, he turned to her, showing Lamian the back of his narrow, dark head, which swiveled on his narrow shoulders in their close-fitting dark jacket.
What they said was inaudible to him; he heard only a soft clink of glasses, and from that and the twist of the man’s shoulder he concluded that they had toasted each other. This made him angry. Her easy rapport with a strange man all too clearly confirmed his suspicion about the understanding that existed between her and those who came to the bar.
He reached for his glass and took a sip. He felt alone, as if he were sitting in an empty room, one that only reflected images and echoed sounds that came from outside, like a box that contained a camera.
There in the background the man and woman were dancing, flanks and shoulders swaying in imitation of the writhing of love; the musicians bent and straightened ceaselessly; the waiter talked to the customer at the other end of the bar, who nodded as he listened. It all seemed so inconsequential, so unreal.
Lamian’s attention shifted to the bony man whose back hid the young woman. He realized that the man had won her, and that it would have been possible for him, Lamian, to have won her. All he needed to have done was recognize that possibility before the bony man appeared and stood alongside her, separating them. He could have done the same thing himself, clinking glasses, opening a conversation. He knew where conversation with such a young woman led, a young woman who came into a nightclub alone, sat down at the bar, and ordered a drink. He would ask if she was alone, if she was free this evening, and the affirmative answer, for it had to be affirmative, would almost demand that he declare his own availability, his own solitude, from which it would follow that they could spend the evening, and the night, together.
He wanted such a conversation for himself, wanted to find out things about her, wanted to establish the easiness of clinking glasses, which had presented itself as a possibility that desolate evening in Subotica, at the Hotel Patria, first in the lobby and then in that dim box which was supposed to resemble a nightclub, a bar, in that little town where none existed. Perhaps the authorities, overly strict, wouldn’t issue a permit, or the hotel management didn’t dare open a nightclub for fear of public opinion, or wanting to avoid the expense and the unruly crowd it would attract.
It seemed to Lamian that he had foreseen this long ago, that all his unease of recent months came from the need of a nocturnal encounter with a strange young woman who would enter the bar with the same, reciprocal need.
Peering over the bony man’s shoulder, he saw part of her cheek, a patch of pale skin, a wave of her hair, and a shadowy fold, either the corner of her lip or the edge of her nose. Stretching his neck, he could see one of her eyes as well, brown and clear, and the eye looked at him. He drew back, but too late, because the bony man had realized, from the direction of her glance or the shadow that fell over her, that something was happening behind his back, and he turned around.
The man’s forbidding dark eyes narrowed, bringing the brows above them together, and met his, but Lamian didn’t look away. The man interested him almost as much as the woman. Who was he? How old was he? Where had he come from, and what was he looking for in this bar? Lamian would have liked to slip invisible between them, as in childhood he had imagined being able to move unseen among others, in tales of magic rings and cowls. Then he could hear what they said and see what they did, every movement and every wink. And feel every touch and squeeze.
