'They're going to kill us, they're going to kill us!'
'Quiet, quiet! Calm her down, she's mad,' said the other women. They looked round – there were no guards in sight. Their eyes and ears were able to rest in the quiet semi-darkness. What pleasure there was, a pleasure they hadn't experienced for months on end, in taking off their half-rotten socks, stockings and foot-cloths, in being free of clothes that had become almost wooden with dirt and sweat. The haircutters finished their job and went away; the women breathed still more freely. Some began to doze, others checked the seams on their clothes for lice, still others started to chat quietly among themselves.
'A pity we haven't got a pack of cards!' said one voice. 'We could play Fool.'
At this moment Kaltluft, a cigar between his teeth, was picking up the telephone receiver; the storeman was loading a motor-cart with jars of 'Zyklon B' that had red labels on them like pots of jam; and the special unit orderly was sitting in the office, waiting for the red indicator lamp on the wall to light up.
Suddenly the order 'Stand up!' came from each end of the chang-ing-room.
Germans in black uniforms were standing at the end of the benches. Everyone made their way into a wide corridor, lit by dim ceiling-lamps covered by ovals of thick glass. The muscular strength of the smoothly curving concrete sucked in the stream of people. It was quiet; the only sound was the rustle of bare feet.
Before the war Sofya Levinton had once said to Yevgenia Nikolaevna Shaposhnikova, 'If one man is fated to be killed by another, it would be interesting to trace the gradual convergence of their paths. At the start they might be miles away from one another – I might be in Pamir picking alpine roses and clicking my camera, while this other man, my death, might be eight thousand miles away, fishing for ruff in a little stream after school. I might be getting ready to go to a concert and he might be at the railway station buying a ticket to go and visit his mother-in- law – and yet eventually we are bound to meet, we can't avoid it…'
Sofya looked up at the ceiling: the thick concrete would never again allow her to listen to a storm or glimpse the overturned dipper of the Great Bear… She was walking in bare feet towards a bend in the corridor, and the corridor was noiselessly, stealthily floating towards her. The movement went on by itself, without violence; it was as if she were gliding along in a dream, as if everything inside her and round her had been smeared with glycerine…
The door to the gas chamber opened gradually and yet suddenly. The stream of people flowed through. An old couple, who had lived together for fifty years and had been separated in the changing-room, were again walking side by side; the machinist's wife was carrying her baby, now awake; a mother and son looked over everyone's heads, scrutinizing not space but time. Sofya Levinton caught a glimpse of the doctor's face; right beside her she saw Musya Borisovna's kind eyes, then the horror-filled gaze of Rebekka Bukhman. There was Lusya Shterental – nothing could lessen the beauty of her young eyes, her nose, her neck, her half-open mouth; and there was old Lapidus walking beside her with his wrinkled blue lips. Again, Sofya Levinton hugged David's shoulders. Never before had she felt such tenderness for people.
Rebekka Bukhman, now walking at Sofya's side, gave a sudden scream – the scream of someone who is being turned into ashes.
A man with a length of hosepipe was standing beside the entrance to the gas chamber. He wore a brown shirt with a zip-fastener and short sleeves. It was seeing his childish, mindless, drunken smile that had caused Rebekka Bukhman to let out that terrible scream.
His eyes slid over Sofya Levinton's face. There he was; they had met at last!
Sofya felt her fingers itching to seize hold of the neck that seemed to creep up from his open collar. The man with the smile raised his club. Through the ringing of bells and the crunch of broken glass in her head, she heard the words: 'Easy now, you filthy Yid!'
She just managed to stay on her feet. With slow, heavy steps, still holding David, she crossed the steel threshold.
48
David passed his hand over the steel frame of the door; it felt cool and slippery. He caught sight of a light-grey blur that was the reflection of his own face. The soles of his bare feet told him that the floor here was colder than in the corridor – it must have just been washed.
Taking short, slow steps, he walked into a concrete box with a low ceiling. He couldn't see any lamps but there was a grey light in the chamber, a stone-like light that seemed unfit for living beings – it was as though the sun were shining through a concrete sky.
People who had always stayed together now drifted apart, began to lose one another. David glimpsed the face of Lusya Shterental. When he had first seen it in the goods-wagon he had felt the sweet sadness of being in love. A moment later a short woman with no neck was standing where Lusya had been. She was replaced by an old man with blue eyes and white fluff on his neck, then by a young man with a fixed wide-eyed stare.
This wasn't how people moved. It wasn't even how the lowest form of animal life moved. It was a movement without sense or purpose, with no trace of a living will behind it. The stream of people flowed into the chamber; the people going in pushed the people already inside, the latter pushed their neighbours, and all these countless shoves and pushes with elbows, shoulders and stomachs gave rise to a form of movement identical in every respect to the streaming of molecules.
David had the impression that someone was leading him, that he had to move. He reached the wall; first one knee, then his chest, came up against its bare cold. He couldn't go any further. Sofya Levinton was already there, leaning against the wall.
For a few moments they watched the people moving away from the door. The door seemed very far away; you could guess its position by the particular density of the white human bodies; they squeezed through the entrance and were then allowed to spread out into the chamber.
David saw people's faces. Since the train had been unloaded that morning he had only seen people's backs; now it was as though the faces of the whole trainload were moving towards him. Sofya Levinton had suddenly become strange; her voice sounded different in this flat concrete world; she had changed since entering the gas chamber. When she said, 'Hold on to my hand, son,' he could feel that she was afraid of letting him go, afraid of being left alone. They didn't manage to stay by the wall; they were pushed away from it and forced to shuffle forward. David felt he was moving faster than Sofya Levinton. Her hand was gripping his, pulling him towards her. But some gentle, imperceptibly growing force was pulling David away; Sofya Levinton's grip began to loosen.
The crowd grew steadily denser; people began to move more and more slowly, their steps shorter and shorter. No one was controlling the movement of people in the concrete box. The Germans didn't care whether the people in the chamber stood still or moved in senseless zigzags and half-circles. The naked boy went on taking tiny, senseless steps. The curve traced by his slight body no longer coincided with the curve traced by Sofya Levinton's large heavy body; they were being pulled apart. She shouldn't have held him by the hand; they should have been like those two women – mother and daughter – clasping each other convulsively, with all the melancholy obstinacy of love, cheek to cheek and breast to breast, fusing into one indivisible body.
Now there were even more people, packed in so tightly they no longer obeyed the laws of molecular movement. The boy screamed as he lost hold of Sofya Levinton's hand. But immediately Sofya Levinton receded into the past. Nothing existed except the present moment. Beside him, mouths were breathing, bodies were touching each other, people's thoughts and feelings fusing together.
David had been caught by a sub-current which, thrown back by the wall, was now flowing towards the door. He glimpsed three people joined together: two men and an old woman – she was defending her children, they were supporting their mother. Suddenly a new, quite different movement arose beside David. The noise was new too, quite distinct from the general shuffling and muttering.
'Let me through!' A man with strong muscular arms, head bent forward over a thick neck, was forcing his way through the solid mass of bodies. He wanted to escape the hypnotic concrete rhythm; his body was rebelling, blindly, thoughtlessly, like the body of a fish on a kitchen table. Soon he became quiet again, choking, taking tiny steps like everyone else.
This disruption changed people's trajectories; David found himself beside Sofya Levinton again. She clasped the boy to her with the peculiar strength familiar to the Germans who worked there – when they emptied the chamber,
