The Teacher Page 8

  He could not be persuaded to go. Years later, she would be amazed when she recalled how the three of them, her mother, her father, and she herself, clung to the humble apartments they had left behind in Kolozsvár, as if there was still a possibility they might return to them someday. He simply did not believe any harm would come to her if she stayed, only growing hesitant over time, when he realized he could not protect her.

  When he asked to speak with her in private, she more or less already knew what he was going to say. He hadn’t negotiated. It was important she know that. He had obtained certain privileges during his six years as school principal. He and Mother had decided to give their spots to her and Eric. He knew she was not happy in her marriage. He was sorry for that and hoped one day she would come to feel differently. He never told her what to do. He had given her advice, which she was entitled to accept or reject. Now she was an adult, and as such was allowed to give him advice in return. But on this matter he was still unequivocally a father to a daughter, perhaps even a father to a child. “Had I known,” he said, “had anyone told me I was bringing my child into a world in which people behaved like this, I assure you I would never have had you.” She asked for time to think about it. He told her there was no time. “This is not something one needs to prepare for. Pack what few possessions you may take, follow the orders.” “But what kind of daughter would I be, what kind of child, if I left you at such a time?” “You’re right,” he replied and smiled. “The kind of daughter every parent dreams of having, the child you never were, the obedient child who does what her parents expect her to do. The child who understands I’m doing what she would have done with children of her own.”

  Among those climbing into the truck in the ghetto, which was headed to the Columbus Street Camp in Budapest, she spotted Clara and her mother. She was only superficially acquainted with the other town residents gathered there. They were asked to bring along a suitcase and provisions for ten days: two changes of clothing—summer clothes, as they were traveling to Palestine through Spain—six pairs of underwear, a plate, a spoon, a cup and a little canned food. They waited in Columbus for several days, maybe more. Every day more people showed up, fought with the guards at the entrance, asked who was in charge, they had to get on the train, they would not budge until they were let in, and waited for the guards’ shift change, perhaps they could still find a way in. She had brought along books for the road, and tried reading while at the camp, but couldn’t; what had she been thinking? And yet, for how long could she stand this idleness? This word, which her father used to criticize her innate absentmindedness, amused her now that she had ample time for idleness yet lacked the means for it; even idleness required certain favorable conditions. The presence of children and babies soothed her somewhat, not on the immediate level, of course, they screamed and would not relent, their parents could not explain even to themselves what exactly they were doing there and where they were heading, and there were children from the orphanage who seemed almost unresponsive, but she made a utilitarian calculation—which in all likelihood made sense nowhere but in her own head—and reached the conclusion that if there were children around, it probably wouldn’t take much longer. The cigarettes that appeared in everyone’s hands brought on a barrage of coughs. “How about putting out that cigarette? My child’s asthmatic.” “Fine.” And yet another man stubbed out his cigarette with his thumb and placed the humiliated butt in his pocket. And one day, she couldn’t tell how many days later, SS men came and led them through Budapest to the train station. They passed through these streets, familiar to some, with a new gait, the gait of someone who knows that very soon he is about to leave for good, and so walks hesitantly, as if to a clandestine funeral. It was the largest group she had ever marched with, bigger than the school or youth movement parades; what did she feel as she marched in step, did she notice the aversion, the suspicion, the disdain, did she encounter the hatred? What she sensed was that distant, elusive, almost apologetic gaze of those who were averse to atrocities taking place under their noses, not because they questioned the guilt of those paraded before them, but because they didn’t want to know, didn’t want to see, didn’t want anything to do with it. And then, after a long hour, when she was already exhausted, she thought she saw her father also crossing the street; she was certain it was him, turned her head and called out to him, wanted to run to him. “Wait a second,” she said, and attempted to escape the procession. You’re mad, it’s impossible, he’s in Kolozsvár, you’re dreaming. She knew it couldn’t be.

  The suitcases and food were unloaded upon their arrival and placed in the last cars. On July 1st, at one-thirty in the morning, the train departed. It carried nine hundred seventy-two women, seven hundred twelve men, and two hundred fifty-two children. As they pulled away from the outskirts of Budapest, the flashes of the bombings lit up the heavy darkness.

  20

  She folded her arms under her chest and pressed them into her ribs, while massaging her waist with her hands and swaying back and forth, as if seeking to alleviate the frequent shivers that wracked her body. For hours she struggled not to sit on the dry straw sheeting of the cattle car floor until she finally yielded, no longer able to stand on her feet. People alternately stood up and crouched. Eric implored her to try and sleep, afterward she could stand if she wanted, but first she must regain her strength. He fashioned a low bunk out of handbags, piled one of the blankets on top of it and spread the other over her knees, bending toward her and placing his wide hand on her feet, which had turned stiff with cold despite the heavy heat. Her fingers were numb and drained of color. She rubbed them together vigorously, pressing them between her knees until she felt them relaxing. The filth, she signaled to him with her eyes, but he shrugged that there was no choice and she must let it go. The rattle of the train along the landscape of barracks raised gray dust that wiped out the existence of the cities and villages, as if they were traveling through a different Europe.

  As the first night fell, she lowered her gaze to the ground and let it wander to the sides of the car, seeking a neutral, faceless space, where she could be alone with herself and close her eyes. The motion was misleading, making her feel as if she were standing in place. Her mind emptied of thoughts and assumed the shape of the car’s metal panels, incapable of preserving any of the sights from the great distance already consumed. Her body shivered with sweat, she couldn’t tell whether from the chill or the fear, and then she lurched forward to grab onto the waist of an older man standing not far from her, taking her back twenty years, to the entrance hall of her parents’ apartment, where she hugged at length a friend of her father’s who was wearing a gray suit similar to his own, before abashedly pulling away from him to the roaring laughter of the guests. Something inside her gave rise to the thought that she would never return home, something that preceded emotion, something almost practical that made her believe she could manage in difficult situations; she was not a strong woman, but she was strong enough for this, despite the fact that nothing in her previous life had prepared her for it, she could endure the unknown, she could carry it and weather anything it might impede, or thwart, or prevent. And perhaps she wouldn’t manage, since she had never managed before, she would simply adapt, ostensibly, outwardly. She scanned the people around her to gauge who was resilient and who was not. In the pitch black of the car she could see that the little girl who had been standing close to her all this time was staring at her. Her fogged up glasses slid down her pinched nose. She wrinkled her nose and tilted her head back like a magician performing a trick of sliding her glasses back up without using her hand. Her mother cautioned her with a look. “Stop it,” she whispered to her. “But my glasses keep slipping,” the girl whined in despair. She had two siblings in the car, one of them looked close to her in age. Elsa searched the girl’s eyes to acknowledge that she saw her, then turned her gaze toward the tip of her own nose in an attempt to achieve a cross-eyed look that would coax a smile out of the frightened fac
e in front of her. She wasn’t sure the girl was resilient.

  The planes circling nearby muffled the blare of the train’s horns and the whistle of its engine, competing with the passengers’ own ruckus until night descended and their loud voices were replaced by a pesky murmur that pounded the moans and sobs into an indistinct mash. The noises of the night troubled her above all. They heralded a continuous stretch of torment from which there was no escape. “Are you from Kolozsvár?” she was asked, in an attempt to engage her in conversation. “Yes.” She knew that because of the Kastner family the answer provoked a certain tension, and was not the same as saying I’m from Budapest, or from one of the provinces. She thought about other answers, but a greater constraint paralyzed her, a constraint that she tried not to view as a type of indifference. It wasn’t that she didn’t care what others thought of her. She didn’t think herself better than them. She felt different from them. She did not expect to feel at home in a cattle car with eighty other people, and yet, her sense of otherness suddenly struck her as it never had before, precisely because she was trapped inside a crowd that had left everything behind, like her, at short notice, in civilian clothes with the stitched yellow badge, precisely because she was experiencing, perhaps for the first time in her life, a tragedy that did not befall her alone, that did not create a gulf between her and everyone else, but rather forced upon her the language of the many, and even if it felt false, it was still unrelenting in its accuracy. “Are you from Kolozsvár?” “Yes.” There was a finite number of places. Someone was inevitably taking someone else’s spot. Which implied that someone could have taken hers. It didn’t mean that the others were doomed, they would simply have to find their own way out, and they would, she told herself, she believed they would, or someone would come to their rescue, since in the past months people had stopped trying to act on their own. Don’t torture yourself with delusions. She knew she could have given her place to someone else. It wasn’t something she could or wanted to tell her father. Maybe he knew, maybe he didn’t. Perhaps he wanted to reignite her survival instinct. You couldn’t tell the person who brought you into this world that you had no more strength to carry on, that everything they cherished, everything everyone was fighting for, now more than ever before, you didn’t reject, certainly not, but you also didn’t desire. Now it was her duty to live for him, who had given her a gift that he had deemed priceless, who had, for the second time, given her life. She needed to muster the strength. “What do you do?” “Teach French,” she replied curtly. It seemed as though her interlocutor expected her to return the question. But she remained silent; she stood out in her persistent silence. They would not let her be. “Are you alone?” “I’m with my husband.” They didn’t ask who was left behind. One brother in Palestine, immigrated before the war. She could not utter his name without smiling. When had she last heard from him?

  It felt as though she had been awake for more than five days, her eyes open, chewing on her lip so that shouts wouldn’t escape from her as they did from the others, falling asleep for brief moments only to wake up again, uncertain where she was and how long it had been since the train first departed. Had she been able to, she would have forgone sleep, simply to avoid the terrifying moment of waking. A heavyset woman, who shifted between standing and sitting beside her, moaned loudly right next to her ear. She couldn’t say anything or try to silence her. They stopped every now and again for long breaks, to empty their bowels and stretch their legs. But the long hours inside the cars took their toll. The stench of urine and feces mixed with the smell of the provisions they had brought, cans of food either too salty or too spicy that left them parched and produced a collective acrid breath that filled the air, and like the noise, grew increasingly monotonous, like a viscous rot that at some point she stopped smelling. The crowdedness and darkness veiled the passengers’ faces. Of course, most of them she had never met before. She remembered the conversation between Father and Müllner about the principle of allocating travel permits—political, social, and religious, they had said. It had a certain logic to it; she understood that logic. The portrait disassembled the public into atomized, allegedly essential components, and placed them side by side in the cramped space, like a cubist painting, in such a manner that prevented them from being reassembled back into a whole she could identify. Only later would she come to recognize what made them a whole. It was tucked into the twofold lesson etched onto their flesh. Without a moment’s notice you could tear people away from the houses they had toiled their entire lives to build; you could feed them only enough not to perish; you could drag them through the unknown, pressed together in ways they had never thought possible; you could torment them in an unfamiliar space and before strangers; you could humiliate and demean them, and they would continue to stand on their feet. Only a few would collapse. Fewer still would commit suicide. The second lesson would be revealed when someone, no one knew who, mistakenly replaced the name of the Auspitz Station with Auschwitz. Word spread through the train like a plague, and until it proved to be a misunderstanding, it served to expose the convoluted nature of privilege, which could turn at any moment into a double-edged sword.

  On the sixth day she awoke to the sound of hysterical screams. She was exhausted as if after a long run and could barely stand up straight. She heard they were being ordered to get off at Linz Station and would be led by foot to a military camp on the outskirts of town, for a shower. First she hesitated whether to hasten her steps or to squeeze to the back of the line, and then resolutely fended off the rumors and threats buzzing around her, quickly dragging Eric to the front of the line, as if the shower were a respite that could restore the humanity she had been robbed of. The sun stood in the middle of the sky and heavy beads of sweat trickled down her face. They had already caught up with the others and arrived at the place, but now the men and women were being separated, and she heard the older women say, this is it, we’re finished, and the younger ones silenced them, because they were ordered to undress and hand over their bundle of clothes for disinfection before being led into a giant, deserted white hall where they were forced to wait, naked, for hours. It turned out, now she heard it all clearly, that the SS officers didn’t know they were the passengers of a rescue train, and that as far as they were concerned, all trains were bound for Auschwitz, and that perhaps they were going to send them off with a stream of gas right then and there.

  Seventy years have since gone by, and one can more or less piece together what happened there. Elsa Bloom-Weiss standing naked, alone in the women’s line, no children of her own beside her. Eric huddled with the other men. Clara and her mother are nowhere in sight—they had entered a different car in Budapest.

  I don’t know what thoughts crossed her mind. Does that even need to be said? Even when it seems I’m disappearing, remember I’m in the picture. I believe I knew the girl Elsa Bloom had been, she could have been me, but now I am about to lose her entirely. I know Elsa Weiss is destined to one day arrive in Palestine and never speak of what happened to her, and maybe for that reason I should stop here. What business do I have with that thing she struggled to erase from her consciousness so she could carry on? Even if somewhere the so-called “simple version” exists, once she chose not to divulge it, the story belongs to no one and simplicity is far from it. A vast gulf stretches between us, I cannot skip over it, and I must remember that in the end life triumphed, life always triumphs over the great catastrophes, and even if we don’t always see it that way, and sometimes sink into melancholic pessimism, life is ultimately in greater supply than death. And yet something compels me to continue. Memorial days and films, literature and academia and five decades of existence have allegedly taught me how to write, with a steady pen, about ashes and mud and a cold I have never known, without trembling. I have also learned how to phrase insoluble contradictions between the ability of the consciousness to say whatever it feels like, and the restrictions the conscience imposes on speech. In the past, I had found a form o
f compromise. I did not enter any camps, I did not invade any bodies, did not cross any borders, I did not dare. Others probably had to cross the border for me, while I settled for presenting fundamental questions about the limits of representation. Until I was suddenly afraid that my time was running out, and I knew that I actually wasn’t certain of anything, not of the reality of the places I had visited, not of the sights revealed before me, not even of my own experiences. I had been only half present in all of them. I wish to revisit each one of them as if for the first time.

  Elsa cast her gaze upon the long line snaking behind her. She could not see anyone she knew. The women and children circled around her naked like a tight ring, and she stood as if nailed in place. Standing for so long exhausted her. She shifted her body weight from side to side and wished she could get on her knees, but knew she mustn’t draw attention to herself, and that in any case, she must be vigilant. She heard the buzzing of an electric razor coming from the direction of the showers and noticed a woman sitting there with the razor and clumps of hair piling up, and she started to itch, although she knew it was impossible, she did not have lice. The line of women before her was dwindling, and she felt the blood draining from her body and a terrible weakness assailing her, and she knew that they could do whatever they wished to her, that she could perform only the most basic, fragmented motions required of her, take a few steps, hold her hands open, spread her thighs, lower her head, that was more or less it, she knew, while the Ukrainian guards dragged her to the SS physician, whose hands wandered across her body and penetrated her private parts to smear them with Lysol. Her head was heavy and void of thoughts, she didn’t even wonder about the events taking place internally. The shower mercilessly whipped her sheared scalp. The stinging disinfectant let loose a long moan from her mouth. At a certain point, but this was already after she had exited the showers, the guards realized a mistake had been made and stopped shaving heads. She was surprised to find the bundles of disinfected clothes waiting for them at the entrance of the hall, but the immaculate order only exacerbated her unease, and it seemed that it also unnerved the others, as they made their way back to their train in withdrawn silence.