Spark of Life (4 page)

“Bombing,” said Berger. “The town has been bombed. For the first time. American planes.”

“Oh—”

“Yes,” said Berger, low and hard. “It’s coming nearer! You’ll be avenged, Lohmann.”

509 glanced up quickly. Berger was still standing, and he could not see his face. He saw only his hands. They opened and closed as if strangling an invisible throat, letting it go and strangling it again.

Lohmann lay quiet. He had closed his eyes again and hardly breathed. 509 wasn’t sure if he had still understood what Berger had said.

He got up. “Is he dead?” asked the man on the upper bunk. He was still scratching himself. The other four squatted by him like automatons. Their eyes were vacant.

“No.”

509 turned toward Berger. “Why did you say that to him?”

“Why?” Berger’s face twitched. “Because! Can’t you understand that?”

The light veiled his egg-shaped head in a pink cloud. In the pestilential thick air it looked as though he were steaming. The
eyes glittered. They were filled with water, but they were that way most of the time; they were chronically inflamed. 509 could imagine why Berger had said it. But what comfort was it for a dying man still to know that? It could as well make it even more difficult for him. He watched a fly settling on the slate-colored eye of one of the automatons. The man did not blink his lids. Perhaps it was a comfort after all, thought 509. Perhaps it was even the only comfort for a sinking man.

Berger turned round and pushed himself back along the narrow corridor. He had to climb over men lying on the ground. It looked as if a marabou were wading through a swamp. 509 followed him.

“Berger!” he whispered, as they left the corridor.

Berger stood still. 509 was suddenly out of breath. “Do you really believe it?”

“What?”

509 couldn’t make up his mind to repeat it. It was as if it might then fly away. “What you said to Lohmann?”

Berger looked at him. “No,” he said.

“No?”

“No. I don’t believe it.”

“But—” 509 leaned against the nearest partition. “Then why did you say it?”

“I said it for Lohmann’s sake. But I don’t believe it. Nobody will be avenged, nobody—nobody—nobody.”

“And the town? After all, the town’s burning!”

“The town is burning. Many towns have burned already. That means nothing, nothing—”

“It does! It must—”

“Nothing, nothing,” Berger whispered passionately with the despair of one who has had a fantastic hope and has immediately buried it again. The pale skull swayed to and fro and water ran out
of the red eye sockets. “A small town is burning. What’s that got to do with us? Nothing! Nothing will change. Nothing!”

“They’ll shoot a few,” said Ahasver from the floor.

“Shut up!” shouted the former voice from the dark. “Can’t you for once keep your goddamned traps shut!”

509 crouched in his place near the wall. Above his head was one of the barrack’s few windows. It was narrow and high up and at this hour had some sun. Then the light reached the third row of bunk boards; from there on the room lay in permanent darkness.

The barrack had been built only a year ago. 509 had helped to put it up; at that time he had still belonged to the labor camp. It was an old wooden barrack from a defunct concentration camp in Poland. One day four of them had arrived in parts at the town railroad station, had been carried on trucks to the camp where they had been put up. They had stunk of bedbugs, fear, dirt and death. Out of them the Small camp had grown. The next transport of disabled, dying prisoners from the East had been crammed into it and left to themselves. It took a few days before they could be shoveled out. Then more cripples, sick, broken-down and disabled men had been jammed into it and it had become a permanent institution.

The sun cast a distorted square of light on the wall to the right of the window. On it faded inscriptions and names became visible. They were inscriptions and names of former inmates of the barrack in Poland and Eastern Germany. They were scribbled on the wood in pencil or had been scratched in with wire ends and nails.

509 knew several of them. He knew that just now the corner of the square was lifting out of the dark a name that was framed by deep lines—Chaim Wolf, 1941. Chaim Wolf had probably written
it when he knew that he had to die, and had drawn the lines around it so that no member of his family could be added to it. He had wanted to make it final so that he alone was it and would remain it. Chaim Wolf, 1941, the lines drawn tight and hard around it, so that no other name could be added to it any more; a last adjuration to fate from a father who hoped that his sons might be saved. But underneath, below the lines, close, as though they wanted to cling to it, stood two other names: Ruben Wolf and Moische Wolf. The first one upright, awkward, the writing of a schoolboy; the second slanting and smooth, resigned and without strength. Next to them another hand had written: A
LL GASSED
.

Diagonally underneath, above a knothole on the wall, was scratched with a nail: Jos. Meyer, and beside it: Lt.d.R. EK 1 & 2. It meant: Joseph Meyer, Lieutenant of the Reserve, owner of the Iron Cross, First and Second Class. Meyer had apparently not been able to forget this. It must have poisoned even his last days. He had been at the front in the first World War; he had been made an officer and received the distinctions; because he was a Jew he had to accomplish twice as much as anyone else. Later, again because he was a Jew, he had been imprisoned and exterminated like vermin. He had undoubtedly been convinced that the injustice done to him had been greater than that done to others because of his contributions in the war. He had been mistaken. He had only died harder. The injustice did not lie in the letters which he had added to his name. They were only a shabby irony.

The square made by the sun glided slowly on. Chaim, Ruben and Moische Wolf, whom it had only touched with one corner, disappeared again in darkness. Instead, two new inscriptions moved into the light. The one consisted of only two letters: F.M. He who had scratched it in with a nail had no longer thought as much of himself as had Lieutenant Meyer. Even his name had been almost a matter of indifference to him; nevertheless he had not
wanted to succumb without leaving a sign. But under it a full name appeared again. There stood, written in pencil: Tevje Liebesch and family. And next to it, more hastily, the beginning of the Jewish Kaddish prayer:
Yis gadal—

509 knew that in a few minutes the light would reach another blurred inscription: W
RITE TO
L
EAH
S
AND
—N
EW
Y
ORK
—The street was no longer legible, then came: F
ATH
—and after a piece of rotten wood:
DEAD
. S
EARCH FOR
L
EO
. Leo seemed to have escaped; but the inscription had been made in vain. None of the many inmates of the barrack had ever been able to notify Leah Sanders in New York. No one had gotten out alive.

509 stared absent-mindedly at the wall. Silber, the Pole, while still lying in the barrack with bleeding intestines, had called it the Wailing Wall. He had also known most of the names by heart and in the beginning had even made bets as to which of them the spot of sun would reach first. Soon afterwards Silber had died; but on bright days the names had continued to wake to a ghostly life and then disappeared again into the dark. In summer when the sun stood higher others, scratched in lower down, became visible, and in winter the square moved higher up. But there were many more—Russian, Polish, Yiddish—which remained forever invisible because the light never reached them. The barrack had been put up so fast that the SS had not bothered to have the walls planed. The inmates bothered even less, least of all about the inscriptions on the dark sections of the walls. These no one even attempted to decipher. Nobody was foolish enough to sacrifice a precious match simply to grow more desperate.

509 turned away; he didn’t want to see all that now. He felt suddenly alone—as if in some peculiar way the others had become estranged from him and they no longer understood one another. He still waited awhile; then he couldn’t bear it any more. He groped his way to the door and crawled out again.

He was wearing now only his own rags and felt cold at once. Outside he rose to his feet, leaned against the barrack wall and looked down at the town. He wasn’t quite sure why, but he no longer wanted to be on all fours; he wanted to stand. The guards on the watchtowers had not yet returned. The control on this side was never very strict; those who could hardly walk could not escape.

509 stood at the right-hand corner of the barrack. The camp was laid out in a curve which followed the range of the hills, and from here he could see not only the town but also the quarters of the SS troops. They lay outside the barbed wire behind a row of trees which were still bare. A number of SS-men were running to and fro in front of them. Others stood together in excited groups and gazed down at the town. A large gray automobile came fast up the mountain. It stopped in front of the Commandant’s house which lay a short distance from the SS quarters. Neubauer already stood outside; he immediately got in and the car dashed off. From his days in the labor camp 509 knew that the Commandant owned a house in town where his family lived. His eyes followed the car so attentively that he did not see someone coming quietly along the path between the barracks. It was Handke, the block senior from Barrack 22, a squat man who always sneaked about in rubber soles. He wore the green triangular badge of the criminals and was in the camp for manslaughter. Most of the time he was harmless, but when he got his fits he had sometimes beaten people till they were cripples.

He came strolling along. 509 could still have tried to sneak out of his way—signs of fear usually satisfied Handke’s simple need for superiority—but he didn’t do it. He remained standing.

“What are you doing here?”

“Nothing.”

“H’m, nothing.” Handke spat in front of 509’s feet. “You bedbug! Dreaming, eh?” His flaxen eyebrows went up. “Don’t you get
a swollen head! You won’t get out of here! They’ll send all you political dogs up the chimney first!”

He spat again and went away. 509 had held his breath. A dark curtain waved for a second behind his forehead. Handke couldn’t stand him, and 509 usually avoided him. This time he had stood his ground. He watched him till he vanished behind the latrine. The threat did not frighten him; threats were daily fare in the camp. He thought only of what was behind the words. Handke must have sensed something too. Otherwise he wouldn’t have said it. Maybe he had even heard it over at the SS. 509 turned round. So he was not such a fool after all.

He looked once more at the town. The smoke now lay close over the roofs. The sound of the fire brigade bells rose up thinly. From the direction of the railroad station came irregular crackling, as though ammunition were exploding. The camp Commandant’s car took a curve down the mountain so fast that it skidded. 509 saw it and suddenly his face grew distorted. It screwed up into laughter. He laughed, laughed, noiselessly, convulsively, he couldn’t remember when he had laughed last, he could not stop, and there was no joy in it, he laughed and looked carefully round and raised a feeble fist, clenched it and laughed, until a violent fit of coughing threw him down.

THE MERCEDES CAR
shot down into the valley.
Obersturmbannführer
Neubauer sat next to the chauffeur. He was a heavy man with the bloated face of the beer drinker. The white gloves on his broad hands gleamed in the sun. He noticed it and took them off. Selma, he thought, Freya! The house! Nobody had answered the telephone. “Get on,” he said. “Get on, Alfred! Drive on!”

In the suburbs they smelled the stench of fire. It smarted more and grew denser the further they went. Near the New Market they saw the first bomb crater. The savings bank had collapsed and was burning. The fire brigade had driven up and was trying to save the neighboring houses. But the jets of water seemed much too thin to have any effect. The crater on the Square stank of sulphur and acids. Neubauer’s stomach contracted convulsively. “Drive through the Hakenstrasse, Alfred,” he said. “We can’t get through here.”

The chauffeur turned. The car made a wide detour through the southern section of the town. Houses with small gardens lay here peacefully in the sun. The wind stood to the north and the air was clear. Then, as they crossed the river, the smell of burning returned and grew stronger until it lay in the streets like heavy fog in fall.

Neubauer tugged at his mustache which was clipped short like that of the Führer. At one time he had worn it twirled up like William II. This cramp in the stomach! Selma! Freya! The beautiful house! The whole belly, the chest, everything was stomach.

At last the car turned into the Liebigstrasse. Neubauer leaned out. There was the house! The front garden! There on the lawn stood the terra-cotta dwarf and the dachshund made of red china. Undamaged! All windows intact! The cramp in the stomach eased. He mounted the steps and opened the door. Lucky, he thought, damn lucky! So it should be! Why should anything happen just to him?