Kapo, p.4
Kapo, page 4
Ridiculous and unimposing though loaded with money, because money couldn’t make you taller or fill out your hollow chest or straighten your legs or smooth your complexion; all it did was swell your rump and belly, already protruding, jiggling, and etch greed and sly distrust even more sharply on your face. A small man, Riegler, half a man—even when giving orders to a waitress, unable to keep from squinting at her, front and back, looking for things he hadn’t yet exploited. Even drinking a beer at the bar, he measured how much space the foam took up. Half a man while paying, or giving gifts, or lying with Mrs. Riegler in their safe new abode, which he quickly bought for her under an assumed name, or even while inspecting the report cards of his two sons, for whom he had amassed the gold—at least that was the excuse he gave, unable to invent, let alone imagine, any other purpose.
Lamian smiled at him, conversed with him across an unknown distance and in an unknown direction. “Did it pay off, all the conniving, the plundering of the dead, the spoils you clenched in your fist and wouldn’t let go of? The cigarettes for medicine, the medicine for sausages, the sausages for boots, the boots for a transfer, the transfer for gold, and gold into bars of gold, gold, gold? How many years have passed—nine? ten?—since the Russians nabbed you at that Polish farmstead, at the bottom of that ditch in the woods, then sent you to Siberia, where you were relieved of your gold-filled boots? Or did the Pole cut your throat that night, when you fell asleep in his bed, and drag you off in secret to a field and bury you boots and all, not knowing about the gold, contenting himself with what he found in your belt?”
For a long time that was the story Lamian preferred, the picture of Riegler packed beneath the clay, where the snow had been cleared and then shoveled back, Riegler buried in his uniform, with belt, revolver, and wallet containing the photographs of wiry, beady-eyed Mrs. Riegler and the two Riegler boys, and buried also with the boots, size 7, so small that the Pole had not kept them to disguise them as civilian boots, knowing he couldn’t sell them.
The gold in the ground, hidden for all time, never found by anyone: like its owners, whose jaws it had been pried from before they were burned in the crematorium.
They were in heaven; their gold was in the ground. The separate elements of air and earth. But destined to be rejoined one day, when the ashes floating in the air slowly fell and finally touched the soil, uniting with it after all those years of being borne aloft, seeping now with the raindrops into the narrowest of cracks, down to where Riegler lay in his boots, he already crumbling, flesh and leather alike, but the gold would still be gold, like the pistil of a flower when the petals have fallen off—yellow, gleaming, solid, unbreakable, indissoluble, and united at last with the ashes of those who once wore it.
But no, he would prefer it not to be so: that is he would prefer for Riegler to be alive. Easier if Lamian knew that both of them had made it out of the swamp of butchery and death. For him to have saved himself and Riegler to have drowned would be too great a favor from chance, too conspicuous, too flaunting a gift of fate. Because they were all dead, every one of them who had seen him clamber over the hill of bones, through the stench of burnt flesh. No, it would be better not to be a unique specimen, an example of a thing that existed nowhere else, a freak.
With Riegler alive, Lamian wouldn’t be that freak. And he could testify (impossible to do on his own behalf) that Riegler was no monster, no Satan, but an ordinary person with a single passion, a passion for gold, a passion—and not as deviant as some—which anyone could have without being excluded from the human race. His sin, then, was only human, and if he escaped punishment for that sin, well, such things happened, didn’t they? Who knows how many had committed some crime, yet continued to live among people, and lived to die the sort of death that others died! Hundreds of them, now resting peacefully, at one with nature, merged with the earth from which grew the lush, pristine grass and where the roots of lovely, leafy trees drew nourishment, ignorant of the filth that had rotted there. For at a certain point of decay, filth and purity became one, both reduced to their chemical elements, all the peculiarities of their origins stripped away.
WITH HELENA LIFKA IT WAS DIFFERENT. HER FACE, which had appeared beside Riegler’s and gradually supplanted it, was the face not of an accomplice but of a victim. It wept. From those large blue eyes, with their widened irises and the whites banished to the corners, eyes open all the way between the broad brown arcs of her brows and the cheekbones of her long smooth white cheeks, flowed copious pear-shaped tears, unstanchable tears, overtaking each other and sliding down her cheeks and across the corners of her mouth, and down her chin and neck, and falling, at equal intervals, one after another, onto her small, languidly upturned breasts. Like the first time she stood before him, naked, she and the doe close beside her. But not, like the other woman, ready to pounce on the food she would receive. Instead, she stood with shoulders hunched, as if fallen in on herself, and with hands crossed over her crotch and pressed between her legs, so that even if she wanted to, she couldn’t use a palm or finger to wipe the trickling drops, or smear them over her face.
Probably she didn’t think of the tears, too distraught, more distraught than any of the other women prisoners when presented with the temptation of extra food, tasty, abundant food, which ought to have made her grateful and compliant.
She didn’t even look at the food, although he was pointing to it with both hands, wanting to pull her, as he had done with the others, from what was hurting her within, pull her from the personal, the individual, and take her by the shortest possible route to the common, the instinctive, which exists in each of us and which ought to be the strongest thing.
“Look what I have for you,” he said, using the familiar du, following camp custom, but also to emphasize his power of possession and control, even though this was their first meeting; it was only the day before that he had told Blockelteste Lina to send a new prisoner to him in the toolshed, along with the doe. “Look what I have for you,” he repeated, pointing to the workbench, which was spread with all the things he’d brought from the SS canteen, and from the sawmill that belonged to Varminsky, a workman from outside, in exchange for lotions and lipstick. “See, bread and butter, ham, a pot of warm milk. Want some?”
She didn’t even look at it, didn’t even tilt her head so that her eyes, without changing direction, could graze the surface of the workbench. She kept her head low between her shoulders, just as it had been when she came through the hole in the wall and straightened up inside the room, eyes straight ahead, fixed on nothing, wanting not to look but to shed those big tears of hopelessness that slid one after another down her face and body.
AND NOW THAT FACE COULD APPEAR AT ANY MOMENT, demanding vengeance. Not weeping but with an angry fire in those blue eyes, eyes trained on him above the outstretched arm, forefinger first, as stiff as the bayonet on a rifle. A bayonet to stab, to punish the war criminal. He had been prepared for this, at all times, from the moment he began his second, postwar life, but had anticipated a very different kind of accusation: one made by men, who would accuse him of cruelty to the point of murder, of theft to the point of starvation.
The shaming accusation by a woman caught him off guard. It was humiliating. Nor could he confess, defiantly or sorrowfully, justifying what he had done—though he knew there was no justification—by the circumstances that had been thrust upon him. Because the toolshed with the naked bodies of starving, imprisoned women had not been thrust upon him: he had engineered that entirely by himself. So the possibility of being accused by Helena Lifka made him confront, for the first time, his own undeniable guilt. The guilt that was part of his flesh, his blood, part of what made him Vilko Lamian, different in just this way from all other criminals.
The new threat terrified him, it seized him and pushed him toward the abyss from which he had always fled, fled even though he knew, sensed, that at the bottom of that abyss lay the explanation for every evil he had suffered or committed.
The explanation of his differentness, which he had always hidden, been ashamed of, but which had dogged him and created, between him and everything else, uncertainty, unease. People, buildings, streets, shops, marketplaces, the rooms he entered. His parents, his relatives, the fields and parks he walked through with his mother and father or with his classmates. It would appear like an omen, his differentness, whenever he put his trust in someone, or in anything other than himself, and he would awaken from that trust and see it was impossible.
He played with Puba Weinberger and Anita Cohan. Puba the same age as he, son of friends of his parents; Anita a year younger, granddaughter of the landlord. They scampered and chased each other around the cramped concrete square of the courtyard, which the kitchen windows of all three looked out on. They pulled skinny, homely Anita’s hair, long and snarled, and took away her doll, one of whose legs was already loose. They kicked a ball, hung and yelled like Tarzan from the rickety frame used for beating carpets, went down to the basement when the ball fell through the basement window, and there groped their way in the dark and felt and tickled each other, the two boys mainly touching invisible Anita, excited by her skin and hair damp with sweat, by her noisy breathing and her shrieks. Outside stretched the endless day, where everything seemed vast and fascinating, but the basement, dank and cold, drew them like a well that aggravates thirst instead of quenching it.
Then voices would begin to call—one, two, three voices, first his mother or Puba’s, for dinner, which would be enough to remind the other two mothers busy at their stoves. An end to the mischief; it was back up to the courtyard and from there to their apartments. His on the ground floor, Puba’s on the second, and Anita’s across from it—the landlord’s apartment, the only one with a balcony, from which the booming voice of her father, as he leaned on the railing and smoked a cigarette, his hair bound in black netting, would greet the neighbors early each morning.
Or else Lamian played submarine, alone in bed in his nightshirt, crawling beneath the quilt and making sounds for the pounding of the engines, the gurgling of the water, the blast of an underwater mine—all very quietly, so no one would hear and embarrass him, even though he knew his mother and father were not in the apartment but playing cards at the Weinbergers’, a fact that at the same time he tried to put out of his mind, in order not to be overcome by fear at being alone, so he abandoned himself to this submarine danger until his ears caught the scrape of the key in the lock, the squeak of the door. Then he got out from under the quilt, put his head on his pillow, and pretended to sleep, not wanting the faces and words that would swoop down on him if he admitted to being awake.
Or, during summer vacation, he would lie on his stomach in the grass near Plavnica, engrossed in a book by Karl May, galloping bareback next to Winnetoh and ambushing cattle rustlers with Old Shatterhand, when a blow to the ankle would interrupt him and he would look up and see Miša Petarac and Drago Blažetić, barefoot, fishpoles in hand, regarding him curiously.
They noticed no evil; nor did his parents, returning from cards to peek into his room and feel his forehead and tuck the quilt up around his neck. No one noticed any evil, the whole time he was growing up in Bjelovar. He had a secure place there, a place appropriate to his age, with a home and parents who took care of him, and who, in turn, had their own modest place in society. His father, a bookkeeper in a cookie factory, was loved not only by the owner but also by the workers, who came to his home with their shy trust to consult about a promotion, or a job for a relative. His father, with a heartiness that was somewhat boastful, would promise to intercede for them, while his mother, quiet as a mouse, bowed genteelly as she offered them a seat.
His parents were too quiet, too meek. That was what aroused his first feelings of disdain, when he came back from play, from his fantasies, from encounters with other people, other families, came back and saw their anxiously smiling faces.
One evening, returning from a piano lesson, he met Drago Blažetić crying in the street, leaning against a wall by the entrance to The Stag, a cellar tavern. When Lamian went up to him, thinking his friend had lost something, offering to help him find it, Drago punched him in the chest and hissed, with a twisted face, “I’ll kill him, I’ll cut his throat tonight when he’s asleep.” Drago blubbered that he had come to get his drunken father and take him home from the tavern, where he was breaking glasses and throwing away money by buying everyone drinks—but his father had thrown him out.
A few months later, on orders from his teacher, Lamian went to see Drago, who was sick, and go over some lessons. In the stuffy room, where the boy lay under a down comforter, Lamian found the father as well: tall, with a mop of glossy hair, vest unbuttoned, very cordial and friendly. As Lamian was leaving, Drago pointed proudly to the rifle hanging by its strap on the wall above the bed. “That’s Papa’s. For hunting.”
Lamian’s father not only had no rifle, he never mentioned rifles, not even when talk turned to the war, in which he had also been a bookkeeper, in a supply unit. He loathed that period of his life. In his wants and habits he was as different from Mr. Blažetić as he was similar to Puba’s father, Gusti Weinberger, and Anita’s father, Ludwig Cohan; similar to all the other people on the first two floors of the building, who were all Jews. But on the third floor, directly above the landlord and next to the bank clerk Arnold Lustig, who was also a Jew, married but childless, there lived a Christian, Ivan Mihovilović, a judge who had a wife and a grown son named Vladimir but called Lacik at home.
At the time, Lamian was unaware of the crucial differences between the majority and minority in the building, and between that same majority and minority in the city. The differences were revealed to him gradually, as through a thin fog that dispersed patch by patch under a slow but steady wind. That wind was scenes and facts which, like the hunting rifle over Drago Blažetić’s bed, were insignificant in themselves but took on meaning when related to other scenes and facts, a whole series of interconnected things. The fog meanwhile was preserved by his parents’ reluctance to acknowledge the existence of differences.
They had him christened, made him a Catholic, so that the differences would be erased, at least in the future. Not that they stressed it or flaunted it; they themselves remained Jews, considering it too late for them to change, but were unobtrusively Jews, staying away from the Jewish place of worship, not openly observing the Jewish holidays.
Christmas they did celebrate—not by taking little Vilko to Mass, of course, but by trimming a tree and placing it in the dining room. Beneath it, in the glow of lighted candles, they gave gifts to him and to each other. At Easter, he got a new suit and shoes, and his mother supplied him with a bottle of scented water, which on the way home from school the next day he sprayed at the girls in his class. In his first year of high school, he was confirmed, and received a wristwatch from his father in honor of the occasion.
All this, reinforced in school by Catholic religious instruction, which was provided for the majority while the few Orthodox Christians, Protestants, and Jews went into another room, was to convince Lamian that there were no differences, at least not for him. His father told him this explicitly one afternoon, after seeing off two somber, worried-looking men who held their hats in their hands, and to whom he had given a few banknotes. “Refugees from Austria. If we don’t help them, who will? But they have nothing to do with you, remember that. You’ve been christened. You’re a Catholic, a Croat. Forget about your origins—mine and your mother’s. The only thing Jews can expect is betrayal and persecution.”
But Lamian couldn’t forget. The two men remained etched in his memory: both middle-aged, respectably dressed in suits and ties, their hats off and clasped to their stomachs. But there was something neglected, askew, in the wrinkles of their well-tailored suits, and something fearful in their bearing, and something secretive in the words they spoke to his father, hissing in a kind of toothless whisper, looking over their shoulders and leaning close to his face, in the hallway, as they left the room. And something obsequious, doglike, grateful and disappointed at the same time, in the bow with which they accepted the banknotes.
They would return, they would appear to him in the darkness as he fell asleep, his thoughts scattering aimlessly: there they would be, in their worn suits and hats, with their darting, suspicious eyes, thieves who robbed him of his peace. He would have to drive them away by concentrating on some other image, some other idea.
But then during the day he recognized them in certain passersby, in his father’s friends—not their features or their speech, but that behavior, humble and vigilant at the same time, beseeching and mistrustful, a discordant note wherever they appeared, in whatever street or house. He began to study these people, to classify them according to the traits they shared, and gradually came to identify them with his parents, and then with the other occupants of the building, the Weinbergers, Cohans, Lustigs—everyone except Judge Mihovilović and his family. He concluded finally that all the Jews in Bjelovar were stamped with the same stamp as these exiles and petitioners, these assertive foreigners resigned in advance to defeat. He sensed their weakness, their rootlessness in both the town and the surrounding countryside, their uncertainty because chance had brought them here and made them so timid—and therefore conspicuous and unpleasant.
Yes, unpleasant to him and to the whole community. So Lamian learned to look at them—and at himself among them—from the outside. They were repugnant, they were offensive, and their offensiveness led one to the idea that they should be got rid of. He even heard this voiced out loud, sometimes by his friends—who would abruptly fall silent the moment the words crossed their lips. Silent, he knew, because they suspected, sensed, that he too was different, burdened by his family’s difference—and this bothered Lamian more than the sentiment, more than the threat.
