Kapo, p.7
Kapo, page 7
He moved in, telling Mrs. Basarabić that he was looking for work, that he had lost his first job when he went off on maneuvers and then to war. After this explanation he himself half-believed that finding work was his real purpose in coming to Zagreb, because the money his father had given him wouldn’t last forever. He began buying the newspaper and reading the want ads, studying those especially that asked for experience in engineering.
But few of the ads were directed at educated people, and when he did come across one that suited him, suspicion, like the stench of decay, made him decide not to answer it, a suspicion inspired by the rest of the newspaper, which was filled with threats and condemnations borrowed from the pamphlets he had once leafed through and that were now transformed into laws and decrees. One decree ordered the registration of all Jewish- owned property; another forbade the employment of Jews; another said that Jews had to wear a metal tag with the letter J on their chest to distinguish them from first-class citizens. J’s dangled before his eyes, and he saw his parents huddled in their apartment, jobless, vacant-faced; or he saw them in the street when they had to go out to buy necessities and were exposed to the taunts of the mob, perhaps led by Drago Blažetić. When he wrote to them, he cautiously inquired how they were managing. Their answer was that everything, “on the whole,” was all right.
And then there was no longer any reason for him to keep his parents separate in his dark broodings; the latest law revoked his right to consider himself a Christian, because of his origins, his unbaptized ancestors. He was thrust back among the Jews. He stopped reading the want ads, and saw that he had done well not to succumb to the few attractive offers they contained: his identity papers, which he would have had to submit, now took away his right to work.
When would his right to breathe, to live, be taken away? That would happen as soon as they discovered who he was, in other words, the moment the Ustaša government became aware of him. He had to postpone that moment, perhaps even avoid it altogether. As long as he was alone, with the credulous Mrs. Basarabić the only person in Zagreb who knew about him, he would be safe. So he continued to live a solitary existence and behaved in such a way that Mrs. Basarabić would think his solitude only a matter of preference. He kept to the daily routine he had followed before the announcement of the anti-Jewish laws: in the morning he bought a newspaper, took it home and rustled its pages, as if reading it, then went out again, as if to apply for jobs, but in fact to walk the streets.
These outings now demanded great composure and self-control, and he prepared for them each time, as an actor studies a role. It was summer, and his plus fours and knee socks, being too warm, were not among the clothes he had brought from Bjelovar. All that remained of his earlier façade was his short hair. He kept it short, and walked accordingly, with a step that was firm and decisive. But behind that energetic gait his fear flowered, like mold behind a white wall, and his eyes sought barriers, traps, expecting a deranged figure to leap out at him from behind a corner or out of a doorway, and strike him and curse him.
Occasionally Lamian came upon a man or woman with a metal tag on their chest, and he could hardly resist the urge to follow them, to see where they were going and why, and what was happening to them. He worried about running into Branka, she too disfigured by the tag that resembled a dog license. Would he approach her? What would he say to her? But he couldn’t approach her; that would draw attention to himself and the fact that he did not wear the symbol of inequality on his chest, because even though ordinarily he lacked the courage to disobey the law, wearing that tag for him would mean parting with his last defense, with the strength that still enabled him to go out; it would mean locking himself in his room, not leaving even to eat, and then Mrs. Basarabić would begin to doubt his story about looking for work, and she would summon armed men to break down his door and unmask him.
Which is what happened, except that he never found out who outwitted him, she or they. Returning home one evening and going quietly to his room, he heard the floor creak and turned to see them coming at him—a man with a reddish, well-trimmed mustache, and Mrs. Basarabić. She was a step behind the man, and her eyes were wide with curiosity and fear. The man grabbed him by the shoulder and asked for his papers. Lamian handed them over. Glancing at the papers, the man asked Lamian if he was the son of the bookkeeper Lamian from Bjelovar. When Lamian said yes, the man ordered him to gather his things and told him he was under arrest. “Why?” Lamian asked, although he knew why. The detective, having no desire or need to explain, said, “You’ll see.”
Lamian was taken to the fairgrounds and handed over to some soldiers, who shoved him into an unlit hangar where a mass of people lay and sat on the concrete floor. Stepping over bodies, he found a spot for himself, spread his coat on the floor, and sat on it. During the night the iron doors squeaked open and let in new prisoners, individuals, whole families. The room became so packed that the jostling woke the children, who started to cry.
The morning light revealed a multitude of pale, frightened faces poking out of soiled, wrinkled clothing. They were all Jews; he saw this not only by the metal tags on their chests but also by the familiar expression of helplessness and resignation. A few people near him asked him to hold something for them or guard it, but he did not talk to them, though he wanted to ask where they were from. Were they only from Zagreb, or were they from other places as well, perhaps even Bjelovar? Lamian was relieved that he didn’t recognize anyone, that there was no one there from Bjelovar to identify him.
Though his connection with Bjelovar was entered in all his documents, he thought of ways to repudiate it. He could claim he was the victim of an error, could say he was a different Lamian, not the one wanted by the police. He weighed the pros and cons of saying this, calculated how much time would be needed to refute it, pondered whether or not it would land him in worse difficulties. These thoughts gave him no peace; they clawed him like feverish fingers as he sat dozing with his head on his knees, or as he went out to relieve himself—in a group, under guard, behind the hangar—or as he received his spoonful of soup and ate it out of a bowl borrowed from a neighbor, a watchmaker, or as he saw the guards entering, carrying out some orders, and feared, each time, that it was his turn.
But no one came for him, no one interrogated him. On the third day, again in the evening, they herded everyone onto a field in front of the hangar, then led them in ranks, down a side street, to railroad tracks some distance from the station. Freight cars were waiting for them there, and the guards loaded them inside. At dawn the train began to move, suddenly stopped, moved again. As it grew light and the day advanced, the cars became closer, sweatier; little air entered through the windows covered with barbed wire; they were given neither water nor food.
The train came to a stop. Evening fell, night, bringing relief from the stuffiness but not from the crowding or hunger or thirst. In the morning there were voices, barking and hostile, then the doors opened and the Jews swarmed out to find themselves at the little station in Jasenovac.
Soldiers rushed at them and hit them with rifle butts until they were lined up by fours. They were made to run down a dirt road with leafy hedges on either side. The beating continued as they ran; some fell, shots were heard, and, with the shots, laughter. The Jews arrived at a wire fence; the gate was open wide, and behind it stood more soldiers, bareheaded, uniforms unbuttoned, cheerful. They, too, began striking, swearing, laughing.
Someone grabbed Lamian and dragged him by his lapel so violently, he could hardly keep on his feet. Then he was at a table where two uniformed men sat, and one of them ordered him to show his papers. As Lamian reached into his pocket, a figure in a tight black uniform and black boots leaped forward. Lamian was nose-to-nose with the narrow face and green eyes of Zvonko Gabelić. “So you’re here, you Jewish cur!” he hissed, baring small white teeth. “I knew that’s what you were, I could smell it. I was only waiting for you to show yourself.” Gabelić took the papers and tore them into little pieces that fluttered to the grass. He pushed Lamian with both hands and, as Lamian staggered, kicked him, a sideways blow with his booted foot, in the hip. “March!” he howled, then said in a calm voice to the soldiers, “Throw him in the tunnel and let him rot there.” A hundred hands grasped Lamian, dragged him by the jacket like a doll. His face was soaked with tears of pain and indignation.
BUT THE TEARS THAT FLOWED FROM HELENA LIFKA’S EYES, Jewish tears, he no longer recognized as his own, for by then he was not a Jew, he was a Kapo. He no longer belonged to that corrupt race, he belonged only to himself, to his own body, which strove to vent itself, to burst its chains—in order to live.
Naked, he stood in the toolshed and watched her come near, she and the doe, whom he already knew and immediately motioned into the corner to wait, that he might better examine this new one: her nakedness, her white skin, the round columns of her legs, the small, soft breasts, the short-cropped, light-brown hair, the broad mouth whose thick lips trembled around long, square teeth, and the straight but fleshy nose, and the blue eyes, big as windows, from which tears poured.
She looked a little like a clown, with her inch-long hair, more the hair of a boy than a woman, bristles around ears that lay flat. And her body with its undefined waist, the breasts like those of an aging, pudgy, effeminate man, and her hands joined over her crotch, while her large blue eyes showed no expression, no fear or plea, only gushed big tears that rolled down her face and left glistening tracks on her skin.
He found her more amusing than anything else, and took a playful approach, but not too playful, so as not to reassure her. He restrained his amusement, smoothing it into a kind of mocking politeness.
“Come here,” he said, not touching her. Seeing that she did not obey—not in protest, he realized, but out of helplessness, as if her crying were a task that left her neither the strength nor the will to do anything else—he retreated and sat on the bench before the workbench-table. “Look what I have for you. Bread and butter, ham, warm milk . . .” With indulgence he gestured at the delicacies. “If you want to eat, you have to come here and sit with me on the bench and kiss me. For every kiss you get a bite of bread and butter with ham on it, and a sip of warm milk. Want some?”
Prompted by the joke within him, he did not look at her, as if unconcerned whether the appearance and aroma of the food were having their effect; instead, he began to prepare them for her, cutting a broad, crusty slice from the loaf of bread, using the knife to take a whole corner from the half-pound slab of butter and spread it on the bread, and peeling a strip of ham from the heap of ham and laying it on top of the butter. He then cut the slice of bread—through the ham, pink and moist with fat—cut twice down and once across, making six equal bites, and put the knife aside and reached for the pot of milk, which was still giving off vapors of warmth. “Here. Come.”
Only then did he look up, but not impatiently, not even questioningly, because he knew she couldn’t resist, knew it from experience, from his own hunger, the pit that yawns in the belly, in the whole body, after being without food only a few days. He waited. Still she didn’t move, didn’t even cast an eye at the workbench, at those delectable morsels that would fill the mouth with bliss and the famished stomach with warm, sweet contentment.
Tears kept falling from her eyes, evenly, neither fast nor slow, as if the faucet behind them had been inadvertently left on and there was no one to shut it off. She herself wouldn’t; she wasn’t even aware that she was crying, so preoccupied with the reason for her tears, which he didn’t know but guessed was something trivial and ludicrous, like the rest of her, ludicrous in relation to the abyss of suffering into which she had fallen.
“You are a virgin,” he ventured, and when her lips trembled even more, he knew she was. Which was quite ridiculous, for she was no longer a girl; you could see that by her body—the legs thick and ungainly, the breasts no longer firm, the little wrinkles at the corners of her mouth. The wrinkles could not have been the result of starvation, since her flesh showed that she hadn’t been hungry that long, though when delivered to the camp she had probably been plump—one of those marriageable girls who was too choosy and devoted herself more to the pleasures of the stomach than to courtship.
All the more reason why she had to give in: she was pampered, knew what was good, and although she didn’t turn her brimming eyes to where he pointed, she could certainly smell the food through the fleshy, nostrils that now quivered in response to his smile. “That doesn’t matter,” he said, entertained by her maidenly distress. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, he was angry—angry that she could be so stupid, so petty, as to worry about the small membrane between her legs when her very life was threatened, all that she was and all that she possessed.
“Go, then,” he said, and looked away from her. They didn’t move, either woman. He decided to help her, to take away from her a situation in which she was allowed to hesitate, for hesitation, the illusion of delay, might make her think she was master of her fate. “Go sit in the corner.” He waited to hear her move, but heard nothing, so he looked at her again, expecting to find an expression of repentance, submission, but her face remained unchanged, was melted into its soft features, the eyes shining only with tears, as if she didn’t comprehend, as if she didn’t know the language he spoke.
But these captive women, each one of them, wherever they came from, all understood the few German words required for obedience; they learned them quickly, just as the men did, with their lives at stake. Failure to understand German brought blows about the head and back; it got one tossed into the oven ahead of those who knew the language. No, Lamian saw that that inner resistance was still at work in her, that stubbornness, that fastidiousness acquired by being brought up in some cloistered home where words were carefully chosen and the world’s evil, outside the curtained windows, was hushed up.
He stood, stepped over the bench, went up to her, and grabbed both her arms—it was the first time he touched her—and feeling the softness and smoothness of her white skin under his fingers, he turned her around like a large doll on a revolving pedestal. “Move over there, into the corner.” She went obediently, walking awkwardly on bare feet that caught on the rough floorboards—not too fast, and not with reluctance, but the way she had entered, completely taken up with her weeping and her misery.
He watched her pale body submerge in the semidarkness beyond the circle of candlelight, where another female shape, a little darker in color, crouched, knees together, head sticking up above the anvil. The other woman’s ears, he knew, were pricked for him and his call; her nostrils were dilated to take in as much as possible of the smell that wafted from the workbench, eyes open wide in tension, her mouth drenched with the saliva of her cavernous hunger.
“Come on, you—come here and eat.” The crouching body practically leaped up, and he saw the flat face with wide-set brown eyes, which is why he called her the doe. “You, not her.” The two bodies changed places, the paler one lowering itself in the corner as the other now moved in his direction on short, slender legs.
He sat down again, watching her stand in place, tense and straight, almost on tiptoe. “Come here.” She flitted over to him immediately, brown eyes fixed on the workbench, where the pieces of bread and butter and the pot of warm milk still stood as he had set them out for the clown. The Adam’s apple of the doe’s slender throat bobbed up and down as she swallowed her saliva. “Sit in my lap.” She came to him quickly, slipping between workbench and bench, pushing her knee between his knee and the table, then lowering herself onto his thighs. “Arms around my neck.” She raised her arms, bent over slightly, and braced herself on his shoulders. He put a hand on her left breast, put the other one on her waist. “Kiss.”
She lifted herself to him, reluctantly took her eyes from the workbench, then closed them and pressed her lips to his. He put his tongue into her mouth, probed the warm, wet cavity, felt his penis rise and touch the flesh between her parted thighs. When he withdrew his tongue, she quickly took her lips from his and opened her eyes. He removed his hand from her breast, reached for some food, offered it to her. She grabbed it with her teeth and began chewing.
Again he put his hand on her breast, kneaded it, then lowered it to her crotch, with its fine brown hairs. His finger sought the moist, sweet opening. When she swallowed the food, he took his hand away, raised the pot, and brought it to her mouth so she could drink. He set the pot back on the table. “Kiss.” He repeated this five times, each time caressing her more forcefully, more impatiently as his desire grew, and when she had eaten and drunk enough, he slapped her thigh. “Let’s lie down.” She got off him, and he followed her, watching the sway of her narrow, undeveloped hips as she went around the workbench. She looked over her shoulder to see what position he wanted; he indicated she should lie on her back. She dropped to the mat, but behind her in the darkness was that other body, which still knelt, head turned toward the corner. Lamian, lying down between the doe’s legs, putting his lips to hers and his hands on her breasts, thrust his penis in.
But, thrusting, he kept an eye on the clown, aware that she was listening, and this filled him with power. He imagined the feel of her small breasts even as he squeezed these pear-shaped, wide breasts, and his testes tightened. Withdrawing, so as not to impregnate the woman, he remained lying on top of her, kissing her cheek, her lips, slowly ridding himself of his desire for her—but not for the clown, whose protruding white ass he now watched. He was within arm’s reach of it, could touch it, could gouge his fingers into it and leave painful blue marks; he could climb off the doe and renew his invitation to the clown to come and eat, could continue his efforts to conquer her.
