Hoess factually describes the flames which licked up to the sky twenty-four hours a day and roasted the corpses of his victims. The flames were so high and so bright that the anti-aircraft command lodged a complaint, and the smoke was so dense and the stench so strong that the population in the whole neighbourhood began to panic. These reasons, he records, led to the rapid design and construction of crematoria. They built two, each with five huge furnaces, and together these were capable of incinerating two thousand murdered units, but that was not enough, so they set up another two incinerators, but even that was not enough. The largest number of persons gassed and incinerated ever achieved in one day, he records, was just under ten thousand.
That was how it was done, and looking at it purely from the technical point of view, it was a very primitive procedure. However, the human spirit has not been idle in this revolutionary age: the flames which the cleaners have at their disposal today are capable of simultaneously incinerating any number of people in their own homes.
Yet nothing has ever disappeared from this world or will disappear. The souls of the murdered, the souls of all those sacrificed, of all those burnt alive, gassed, frozen to death, shot dead, beaten to death with pickaxes, blown to smithereens, hanged or starved to death, of all the betrayed and of those torn from their mothers’ wombs are rising above the land and the oceans and are filling space with their lamentations.
At first I was alarmed at my attempt to knock the great creator down from heaven to earth. But I don’t believe that this can be done. Our heavens, after all, are linked to our earth. How can anyone unable to relate to the person he loves expect to relate to those he does not love? Kafka realised this, and to stand by the side of the woman he loved meant to him standing by the side of people, becoming one of them, participating in their order. He also realised what most of us are concealing from ourselves: that drawing close to another being, accepting another being as well as another order means the surrender of freedom. Man longs to get close to the person he loves, and in doing so hurts and betrays that person and himself, and thereby he commits a crime.
A lawyer by training, he wrote about one single case. He himself prepared the evidence for his own prosecution, he defended himself passionately, and mercilessly found himself guilty. He never abandoned his theme, but by living it through himself, completely and truthfully, he managed to embrace both the heights and the depths of life.
From below the mountain another flock of crows started up, darkening the sky and making the air vibrate with the beat of their wings. The birds alighted around the treasure-hunters who’d by then finished their work. But it didn’t seem that the two groups took any notice of one another.
One of the men looked down towards us and called out something I couldn’t make out. Immediately the others also started shouting at us. I could see my wife was beginning to be afraid. ‘What are they shouting?’
I couldn’t make it out. Most probably they were offering to start trading with us.
‘Do you want to go over to them?’
She was prepared to go over to them with me, even though she was afraid of them. She’d been trying, at least over the past few years, to indulge my wishes and even my eccentric ideas. She raised no objections to my having been an orange-clad street-sweeper for several months now, although she must have wondered uneasily whether some ulterior motive, or at least a wish to escape from home, was not perhaps concealed behind my occupation. Sometimes when I got back home I felt a note of uncertainty in her question of how I was. Suppose she suspected me of doing something different from what I said I was doing? She had plenty of reasons to distrust me, but neither now nor in the past had she dared ask me straight out. She regarded distrust as something unworthy, something that soiled whoever let it enter their minds.
I realised how often I’d betrayed her confidence in the past. I felt a shaming sense of guilt as well as a need to compensate for it somehow. For a start I said that it was a lovely day, that we’d done well to get out into the country. It sounded a little paradoxical, standing as we were below the mountain of garbage.
Back home our daughter and little grand-daughter were waiting for us. Our son, too, sat down to dinner with us. He’d long been trying to find a place of his own and as always he had a multitude of carefully worked-out plans which, he hoped, would lead him to his objective, whereas our daughter, as always, was giving no thought to her future. There were times when she felt that everything, absolutely everything, still lay ahead of her, while at other times she felt that everything, absolutely everything, lay behind her, that there was nothing left to her but to live out her days – as tolerably as possible. For the most part, however, she gave herself joyfully to the moment. After dinner she wanted to draw me. She cut some large sheets out of wrapping paper, pinned one of them to a stiff folder, and made me sit in an armchair for a long time.
From the kitchen came the clatter of plates, there was the muted sound of my son’s tape recorder, and my grand-daughter could be heard through the wall delightedly recounting some feeble-minded incident she’d seen on our jerkish television. I asked if I might close my eyes and my daughter, having warned me that this would make me look like my own deathmask, agreed. At least I wouldn’t fidget.
From outside came the smell of the sea and a wave licked up the sandy beach.
Hold on a little longer!
Her fingers were moving swiftly in the sand. How I love those beautiful fingers which so often touch me with tenderness and which, moreover, know how to turn shapelessness into shape.
I don’t know if this is my likeness, I’m never sure of my own shape. I have an animal body and the wings of a swan, but I look happy.
Because you are happy, she explains. Or aren’t you happy with me?
Aren’t you afraid that the water will carry me away at night?
That’s why I’ve given you wings, so you can fly away. You have wings so you can be free, so you can go wherever you please. By this she meant: so I could get to her at any time. But the water washed me away, complete with wings, and did not carry me to her, and I don’t know if it ever will.
The charcoal swishes across the paper, the tape now sounds louder, my son’s left the door of his room open. The year before we’d visited him in the provincial town where he was then doing his military service; we’d set out on Saturday morning, we’d decided to put up at a hotel and return on Sunday evening, but Lida had a headache and left early on her own, and I stayed on at the hotel alone. On Sunday morning the bus took me to the barracks where our son was waiting for us at the gates. I thought that he looked quite good in uniform, even though I’m not too fond of uniforms.
He asked me where I’d like to go, but I left it to him to decide: he knew his way around here better than me.
So he took me up some hill where T e snohlidek was reported to have walked, along a cemetery wall with slender yews standing upright behind it, and down a farm track. The weather was cool and windy, around the birches by the track blew small leaves like flakes of coloured snow.
My son spoke about his experiences in the army, then he shyly mentioned that his girlfriend had visited him here too, and hastily returned to military matters. We were in no hurry with our conversation, we had the whole day before us. I couldn’t recall when we had last spent a whole day together, if indeed I ever found that much time in the course of a single day. It seemed to me that my son was suddenly emerging from the dark or returning from a great distance. I’d spent time with so many people, I’d spent days and weeks with my lover, while my son was a fleeting figure in the evening or in the morning or at Sunday lunches. Of course he sat in the room sometimes, along with other guests, listening silently or perhaps coming over for a few words with me – most often about political events or about his classes, never about his personal worries or hopes, and as a rule I’d sit down at my desk after a while and thereby dismiss him. He’d also invite me to listen to protest songs which he’d recorded and which he was sure would interest me, and I’d either decline or else soon doze off while listening to them.
I knew that he had identified with my destiny to such an extent that, even though he’d studied engineering, he was closely – indeed more closely than I – following the fate of literature, at least in the part of the world we lived in, and he’d think up plans for making banned works known to the public, and took delight in any indication, however slight, of a turn for the better.
I regretted that for so long, for whole years on end, I’d never managed to find more time and interest for what made up his life. I now questioned him about his friends, about his girl, and about what he thought about the future. I could see that my interest pleased him, and it occurred to me that he might feel as lonely as I had at his age.
I decided to invite him out for a special meal, but when we got to the tavern all they had was cheap salami, bread and onions. At least I ordered some wine. Our conversation was leaping from one event to another, the most essential things we continued to carry locked up within us. It is difficult to voice the feelings a father and son have
