By Blood (29 page)

The patient returned to Michal’s house as directed.

So now we come to the time after the war, said Michal’s voice on the tape. As we agreed. Just before the very end. Where it was supposedly all over.

Mother and daughter sat in the same upholstered chairs they had occupied the day before. It was early morning, the patient told Dr. Schussler. The room was in shadow. Without light, it was cold, smelling of ancient damp from the stone walls.

There were rumors that the German army was in retreat, Michal continued. The skies were filled daily with bombers, and from the look on the faces of our torturers there was suddenly—how shall I put it? Suddenly they looked like men and women in whose dark minds something had lit up. I don’t mean their consciences. I mean they knew they were going to be punished. The effect was for them to hate us all the more. Because one day we were useful to them, doing things they wanted done. Then—I cannot give you the exact moment—then suddenly we were … evidence.

But where were you? the patient interrupted her mother. In what camp was this?

I told you it does not matter! Every one of us went through the same thing, internally, the ripping-out of every shred of self-respect. What is this constant need to retell the stories in horrific detail? That child frozen. That woman experimented upon. That man electrocuted. All the many ways humans can be humiliated. Why tell everyone how to do this! It is practically pornographic. Yes! It’s pornography to keep disclosing exactly what was done.

She had been ranting; now she was breathless; she said nothing more for several seconds.

All I know is this: One day I was called to an assembly and immediately pushed onto a train. It was a regular passenger train, but we were packed in, so that no one could move. People were sick, emaciated, exhausted, many half-naked—all jammed in together.

I cannot tell you how long that trip lasted, she continued. When you have to remain on alert at every moment, time stands still, is a constant present, and duration has no meaning.

Eventually the train stopped, and we were ordered to march down a road. Ahead I saw barbed wire. I thought: another imprisonment, yet another. The guards pushed us through the gate and left. No one led us to a barracks. No one said when food would be given. No one ordered us to do anything. We were just left there.

Nothing, not even the labor camp or the transport, could prepare me for what lay before my eyes. At least the camp had had rules. There were boundaries, duties, orders, lists. People were used up systematically. The evil was deliberate, conscious, human.

But here …

Before me there seemed to be a field of corpses. Arms, legs, feet, heads protruding from the mud. Wisps of cloth, the remainders of clothing, shivering in the breeze.

Then I saw the blink of eyelids, the tremor of a hand. And I realized there were still living people among them—no, not living exactly. Here a man, there a woman, sitting, staring, vacantly, not turning a head, not a shred of attention for us, the new arrivals, we who had been tossed in among them. They simply fell, as if their joining the dead were inevitable. A process that began with being dropped into the camp, sitting down in exhaustion, falling to one side, dead.

I do not know how long I stood there. But suddenly there was a commotion at the gate. Shouting, screaming, then gunshots—shots fired into the air. Burly guards, not in German uniforms, came rushing toward us. They spoke Hungarian, a language I understood. And after the scene had quieted down, one of the guards came over to me. He stared at me, looked me up and down. His eyes slithered over me like an anxious Midas counting his possessions.
Neck, breasts, belly: all mine
. And then he circled me, once, twice: a snake sliming around me. And then he said—slowly, I will never forget it—he said:

You are as fat and rich and yellow as a big stick of butter. And I want to lick you.

Michal paused. The tape wound on. There was a cough, a sniffle—was she crying? Suppressing tears?

Then she laughed.

Do you know how hard it is to learn Hungarian? It has no relationship to Romance languages, none to Slavic languages. I stood there with the stupidest thought. I thought: I wish I did not understand what that man had just said.

He took me to his barracks, where he raped me for the full day. No sense describing it. It was like all the other rapes, all the other times I had to give up my body to survive. Yes, I slept with them all: guards, inmates, kapos, jailors, kitchen help, it didn’t matter. You see, because I was taken later in the war, and had done what I could to keep eating, I still had breasts. Real, full, suckable breasts. Among all the skeletal women, there I was with two round, soft breasts. What gold I had in them! What I could not exchange for sucks at those nipples!

Finally he brought me food. Then he kept me for two more days, raping me and, in between, feeding me. It was only because of him—and my breasts, and I had those only because Albrecht had kept me safe—for those reasons I am still alive. Outside there was no food, not even any water, as my tormentor kept telling me, saying how lucky I was he had taken me. A typhus epidemic was raging. Hundreds were dying by the hour. See? he said. Compared with death, what is being here with me?

On the third day after my arrival, I was alone in the barracks—locked in—and I heard the rumblings of heavy trucks, maybe tanks. I was afraid it was the German army, and they would come into the camp and just shoot us all. These rumblings went on for some time—hours—then a loudspeaker came on with a screech of, what do you call it, feedback. A howling screech of feedback. And then a big booming voice said:

Ihr seid frei!

You are free, said the patient.

Ah, said her mother, at least you understand a little German. Yes, the voice said we were free.

So it was April 15th, said the patient. The day the British liberated Bergen-Belsen. The day of your liberation.

Liberation! said her mother. You Americans, with your idea of
liberation
. Sailors kissing nurses in Times Square. Ticker-tape parades down Fifth Avenue. Happy families moving to Levittown. How glorious for you to be the victor with not a speck of damage to your homeland. Oh! Has there been a war victor since Rome in which the winning armies went home to such a pristine land?

She paused.

Liberation, she muttered, then fell silent.

At that, the therapeutic session ended, early, for reasons I did not know. The church carillon was not yet done sounding the three-quarter hour when doctor and patient went their separate ways.

The next days proved difficult. Thoughts of the university, of my banishment, swept through my consciousness at what seemed to be regular, four-hour intervals. There was nothing to do but endure it, since, as I have said, such internal processes had a way of suffusing themselves throughout my body, leaving me with as little control over them as one has over glucose absorption, for example. My sole relief was the anticipation of Monday night’s session, the continuation of Michal’s story, its effect upon my dear patient.

I therefore arrived on Monday during Dr. Schussler’s evening break, which she normally observed between 5:00 and 6:30. Her custom was to return no later than 6:45 to receive her three late-night clients, the patient being the last of these.

I sat reading a professional journal for perhaps an hour (by flashlight, of course, for fear of revealing my presence to Dr. Schussler), when I was startled by a sharp rap on my door.

I had no idea who it might be. It surely was not Dr. Schussler, whose walk I would have recognized in an instant.

The rapping came again.

Be calm, I told myself. Whoever it is will go away.

Yet again a fist rapped at the door.

Quiet, I told myself.

Now came a pounding upon the thin center panel of the door—so forceful that I feared for its tender fruitwood.

I saw you come in, said a man’s voice between two bangs on the door.

Who
saw me?
Who was watching me?

I know you’re there, said the voice.

Who is it? I felt compelled to answer.

The manager, he said. I must speak to you.

I opened the door a crack to see a very short man with bulging eyes—but he was not the manager as I had known him!

Are you new? I asked him.

What do you mean? he replied.

I do not know you.

Of course you know me, he insisted. You negotiated your lease with me.

Now I believed I must have lost my mind, because I was certain that I had never before seen this odd-looking man, who, as I examined him further, became stranger yet, with his wild eyebrows and mouth twisted down on the left side. Surely I would have remembered such a creature. In his right hand he held a lit cigar. He took a long draft, then blew
foul-smelling
smoke into my face.

Let’s go inside, he said.

I felt there was nothing to do but comply.

Hey! he said upon taking a step into the office. Why are you sitting in the dark?

My eyes, I said, extemporizing. A medical problem. I must use
low-level
lighting else harm my eyes.

He hummed. I feared he would flash on the lights. But happily he remained standing in the opened doorway.

This won’t take long, he said.

Yes? I asked.

I need to inform you that we’re moving your office, he said.

What?
I all but shouted.

Move you. Downstairs. Same footage, same orientation, just down a floor.

I thought my heart would stop. Move me? I thought. Away from my dear patient!

How is this possible? I argued. My lease term runs through August.

The man who may or may not have been the manager said, Look at your lease.

What should I see there? I asked him.

He reached into his back pocket, from which he retrieved a sheaf of folded paper. He opened it, held it toward the hall light, and pointed at a paragraph.

See here? he said. It says we have leased you Room 807
or comparable space.

I leaned over. I tilted the sheaf of paper to catch the light. My God! The words were actually there!

But are you sure this is the same as my lease? I asked him.

Look, fella, he said. This is the deal. The guys next door want to expand into your space, and I can do it by moving you downstairs. They’ve been here for ten years, you only since last summer, and I’m obligated to accommodate my long-term tenant if I can. And I can. Anyway, they’ve already got your room number.

What was he talking about? Who had what number?

See, your room here used to be 805, he said, stabbing his lit cigar at me as he spoke. Those guys originally occupied it, and when they took the larger office next door, they took the number with them. And then this room didn’t have a number. So we gave it 807.

He laughed.

So you see, you are not even in your own room’s number! Which was supposed to be 805. Look, you move down to 705, since, as I said, 05 was the original number of this line. And the guys expand to fill their original 805, which is now your 807. Then goodbye to 807, since it will be part of 805, its original number. Done. Everyone has a space, everyone has a number. End of story.

I stood swaying; I reached out a hand to my desk to steady myself. Yes, all this taking of room numbers had been explained to me when I first engaged the space, but I never believed it could be forced upon one. Forcefully taken from one space and moved to another! Numbers marching behind like a retinue!

Then I should be in 707, I said, reaching for an argument—any argument—in my favor. At least I should be able to retain the 07!

Sure, said the man with a laugh. Why not? If you like playing James Bond, keep your 07. There’s no 707 at the moment. Sure. If that’s what it takes, we’re done.

No!
I thought.
We could not be done. This cannot happen
. But what could I do? Argue with him further? I had to get him gone before Dr. Schussler’s return.

May we discuss this tomorrow? I asked him.

I don’t know why, replied the man.

You see, I cannot move, I said. I absolutely cannot change offices!

But you said. That 707—

I am in the midst of a project. And any interruption of the sort you suggest will ruin my work and cause me to miss a deadline. Material harm! I lied. You will cause me material harm!

I paused, and thought it would be best to add:

I am begging you, sir. Surely we may find another solution.

He hummed again, puffed on his horrid cigar, and finally said:

There is some possibility—possibility—that the architects on the other side of the engineers are moving. In which case, the engineers might … Well, we’ll see. In any case, even if we take your room, I can give you ninety days, at least.

Ninety days from—?

From the first of next month. See? That gives you nearly three months and a half.

I thought of all that must happen in the patient’s life, and how I might have to leave her in three and a half months. I nearly wept as I stood there.

In any case, the man went on, I’ll let you know … lemme see. The architects have to give notice by … lemme see … end of October. Yeah. October 31st.

At that he turned and left.

Not thirty seconds later, Dr. Schussler’s footsteps sounded in the hall.

The patient settled into her chair, and we soon heard Michal’s voice saying: I was locked in. That Hungarian beast—he left me locked in.

I could hear people shouting in every language. The roar of heavy trucks, or tanks. I kept pounding at the door, Let me out, let me out, in every language I spoke: German, English, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Russian. But people kept running past me; there was too much noise for anyone to hear. This went on for hours—I don’t know how long. Hours. The announcement “
Ihr seid frei
” had come in the afternoon. And from the cracks of light around my door, I thought it had come at three o’clock, maybe four. All the while, the shouting kept on, the heavy treads—boots, I thought. Eventually the light faded: twilight came, then dark.

Something momentous was going on—what?—and there was nothing for me to do but shout “Let me out!” until I was hoarse, until I had no more energy, until I sank down exhausted by the door. Then, sometime after nightfall, I heard shots—pistols? rifles? machine guns? This terrified me because I could not know who was shooting, who was being shot, what new terrors lay outside my locked room, and now I wanted to stay where I was, thinking myself safer inside than out. No sooner did I have that thought than I heard pounding at the far end of the row of barracks, then scuffles, a man’s voice shouting in Hungarian “I had to! I had no choice, they made me, I had to!” Then a shot and a thud, and the voice was stilled, and I knew what was happening: the now-free prisoners were looking for their former guards, and executing them.

I kept hearing doors being kicked in, one after another, each time coming closer. A second guard was found in his quarters, and shot; then another door was splintered, and another. I took off my kerchief, opened my coat, unbuttoned the top of my shift, stood with a hip out—anything to make it clear at a glance that I was female. Because most men, not all—most men, no matter how evil, will hesitate before killing a woman. Something in the bones and blood says no, speaks more quickly than even the desire for revenge. So there is sometimes a moment, the merest slip of a second, during which one might turn or lunge or shout and somehow fool death one more time.

They destroyed the door of the room next to mine. Then they came to me.

I shouted, in the highest voice I could manage, a wail, a puppy-dog cry. Either they did not hear or their thirst for killing had closed their ears. They heaved themselves against my door, once, twice. With a crack, the frame gave way. And they tumbled into the room.

Three men, one rifle, pointed at me.

Hungarian whore! shouted the man with the rifle, in Polish.

Kill her! shouted the second man, in Yiddish.

I had my hands up. No, no, I am a Jew, I said in Polish, then in Yiddish. No, I am a Jew!

Liar!

Shoot her!

We were all shouting at once, and I thought I would be killed in all the confusion. I could smell their bloodlust—they had just come from killing, and they smelled of it. Any moment the trigger would be pulled, inevitably—I nearly laughed that I had come this far, survived this far, only to be killed by fellow prisoners—really, such a thought went through my head. They kept shouting “Hungarian whore!” and “Kill her!”  They were shaking. Possessed. Hungry for revenge. I kept repeating, I was raped! He took me and kept raping me! Finally I yelled out, Do you want me to show you the damage, the bruising, the blood?

They fell silent. In that terrible moment I realized I had put the wrong thought in their heads. I could see in their eyes that they did want to see the damage, wanted to undress me, that they were imagining … And I thought, Oh, God! I am going to be raped again, but this time gang-raped, a fate I had managed so far to escape.

Then a voice outside the room shouted in Yiddish, What’s going on in there? And someone pushed his way into the room.

He wasn’t a big man, but there was something powerful about him, his solidity, his bearing. He stood with his back very straight, holding a rifle. His eyes were dark, and as he turned intently to each of the men, he seemed to draw all the light out of the room and into his eyes—what little light there was, so that it seemed to grow even darker around us—which put a sort of spell over the other men. Their emotions were suddenly rearranged, calmed, flattened. The rifle pointed at me fell. All three men turned to this new man. And in measured voices—thank God! I thought; they sounded sane—in measured voices, in Yiddish, they discussed me. Was I a collaborator, a kapo, a whore?

The man who had just walked in—he was clearly a leader; the others were deferring to him—turned to me and asked me what I was doing there.

I told him my story, in broken Yiddish—the one language I understood but did not speak well. I told him my story, that I had come on a transport, had been taken immediately by the guard and raped for three days, that I had heard the announcement “
Ihr seid frei!
” in the afternoon, but had been locked in, wondering—afraid of—what was happening. Then these men …

He said nothing for a long time, seconds, which seemed to me a pause in time itself, a cavernous room in which my fate was being decided. No one moved. I could hear the men breathing, their breath almost echoing, so vast seemed this hole in time.

Then he suddenly shouted, Let her go! Then: Let’s go!

The three men left. I pulled my coat around me and was about to go out the door when the leader said to me, Stay close. Things are very … the word he used meant something like “fluid” or “boiling.”

I followed him down the row of barracks. I heard gunfire, shouting, screams. We turned this way and that, and I could see there were crowds ahead. I had no idea where all those people had come from, they looked like prisoners but healthier, not the living corpses I had seen. I didn’t know then that there was another part of the camp where conditions were better. I only knew that there was a great surge of bodies pushing in all directions, and I struggled to stay close to this leader, this haunting man with his rifle and his penetrating eyes.

We turned a corner at the end of the barracks. The back of the structures had these sorts of eaves, and the barracks were arranged in a line, maybe fifteen, maybe twenty. From each eave hung a body.

Kapos, said the leader in my ear.

We continued on, the leader forcing his way through the crowd, but in a way I found almost magical, because in all that bedlam, he did not push or shout, only touched people and spoke into their ears—or maybe this is merely the way I am remembering it. Because the entire crowd was in a mood as murderous as the men who had forced down the door of my barracks-prison, shouting, Get the kapos! And, To the kitchens! And, Feed us, you bastards! Everyone was shouting. People all but trampling one another in the crush forward, which I soon understood was the way to the kitchen and pantries that had fed the soldiers and guards.

All at once, we were being raked by machine-gun fire. Everyone was screaming. I saw people start to fall—a machine gun was raking the crowd, starting on the far side of the space in which we were caught, a kind of plaza in front of a large building. There was something horribly synchronized about the way people fell, one section after another, dominoes falling, one area and then the next around the plaza: people shrieking, bloodied, downed. I looked up to see where the fire was coming from—it is a stupid reaction but irrepressible; something deep in your nerves wants to know,
Who is killing me?
I looked up, and I saw, standing on the roof of the building, a guard.

My
guard. And at that moment, he saw me. And, for a shaved speck of a second, he hesitated—took his finger off the trigger. Because once they rape you more than twice, something in them adopts you, as a sort of pet, or at least a belonging, a possession. They make some animal connection, even if it is only disgust, or dominance, or a desire to prolong the time of possession. He saw me, my face, my body, the body he had owned, dominated, violated—and, for a mere skip in the progression of time, he backed off on the trigger.

I ducked. Beside me, the leader ducked. And everyone in our quadrant—no, not a quadrant; what do you call the smallest slice of an area? Everyone in our tiny angle also ducked. And was saved.

That shaved second now over, the machine gun resumed its raking to the right of us: the screaming and the falling and the dead.

The leader, next to me, stood and aimed his rifle. A miraculous shot! My guard fell dead.

Was that the one who took you? the leader said into my ear.

How did you know? I said in my broken Yiddish.

He only smiled and said, You saved my life.