Spark of Life (41 page)

“I know,” interrupted 509. “I know that old song. But do tell me, supposing you won and had the power, what would happen to those who are against you? Or those who are not for you?”

Werner was silent for a moment. “There are many different ways,” he said then.

“I know some. Killing, torturing, concentration camps.”

“Among others. Depending on what’s necessary.”

“What an advance over the Nazis! Worthwhile living for!”

“It is an advance,” declared Werner, unperturbed. “It’s an advance in aim. And also in method. We don’t do anything for the sake of cruelty. Only out of necessity.”

“I’ve heard that often enough. That’s what Weber explained to me when he stuck lighted matches under my fingernails. It was necessary in order to extract information.”

The breathing of the white-haired man changed into the halting death rattle with which everyone in the camp was familiar. The rattling sometimes stopped; then in the silence the low rumbling on the horizon could be heard. It was like a litany—the last breath of the dying man and the answer from the distance. Werner looked at 509. He knew that in 1933 Weber had tortured him for weeks in order to extract from him names and addresses. Werner’s address, too. 509 had held his tongue. Then, later on, Werner had been betrayed by a weak Party member. “Why don’t you come to us, Koller?” he asked. “We could use you.”

“That’s what Lewinsky asked me, too. And that’s what we both had discussions about twenty years ago.”

Werner smiled. It was a good disarming smile. “We did. Often enough. All the same, I’m asking you again. The day of individualism is over. One can no longer stand alone. The future belongs to us. Not to the corrupt Center.”

509 looked at the ascetic head. “When all this is over,” he said slowly, “I’d like to know how long it’ll take before you’re as much my enemy as those up there on the towers have been?”

“Not long. We’ve had an emergency coalition here against the Nazis. That will disappear as soon as the war is over.”

509 nodded. “I’d also like to know how long it would be, if your Party came to power, before you locked me up?”

“Not long. You are still dangerous. But you wouldn’t be tortured.”

509 shrugged his shoulders.

“We’d lock you up and let you work. Or shoot you.”

“That’s comforting. That’s how I always imagined your golden age to be.”

“Your irony is cheap. You know coercion is necessary. It’s a defense necessary in the beginning. Later on it will no longer be needed.”

“Oh yes,” said 509. “Every tyranny needs it. And every year more, not less. That is its fate. And always its end. You see it here.”

“No. The Nazis committed the fundamental error of starting a war for which they were not properly prepared.”

“That was no error. It was a necessity. They couldn’t help it. Had they been forced to disarm and maintain peace, they’d have gone bankrupt. The same will happen to you.”

“We’ll win our wars. We conduct them differently. From within.”

“Yes. From within and toward the inside. You might as well keep the camps here going. And fill them.”

“We might,” said Werner quite seriously. “Why don’t you come to us?” he repeated then.

“For that very reason. If you should come to power outside, you’d have me liquidated. I wouldn’t. That’s the reason.”

The white-haired man rattled now at longer intervals. Sulzbacher came in. “They say German planes are going to bomb the camp tomorrow morning. They’ll destroy everything.”

“One more latrine rumor,” declared Werner. “I wish it was already dark. I must go back.”

Bucher glanced at the white house on the hill beyond the camp. It stood in the slanting sun amidst the trees and was undamaged. The trees in the garden had a bright sheen of the first pink and white cherry blossoms.

“Do you believe it at last?” he asked. “You can hear their guns. They’re coming nearer every hour. We’ll soon get out.”

He looked once more at the white house. It was his superstition that all would go well as long as the house remained intact. Ruth and he would live and be saved.

She crouched beside the barbed wire. “And where’ll we go when we get out?” she asked.

“Away from here. As far as possible.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere. Perhaps my father’s still alive.”

Bucher didn’t believe it, but he didn’t know for certain his father was dead. 509 knew it, but he had never told him.

“None of my family’s alive,” said Ruth. “I was there when they were taken to the gas chambers.”

“Maybe they were only sent on a transport. Or they let them survive somewhere else. After all, they let you survive.”

“Yes,” answered Ruth. “They let me survive.”

“We used to have a little house in Osnabrück. Maybe it’s still standing. They took it away from us. If it’s still standing, we might perhaps get it back. We can go there and take refuge.”

Ruth Holland didn’t answer. Bucher looked across at her and saw she was crying. He had almost never seen her cry and thought it was because of her dead relatives. Death, however, was such a daily occurrence that it seemed to him exaggerated to show so much grief after so long a time. “We mustn’t think back, Ruth,” he said with a trace of impatience. “Otherwise, how shall we ever be able to live again?”

“I’m not thinking back.”

“Why are you crying, then?”

Ruth Holland wiped the tears from her eyes with her clenched fists. “Do you want to know why they didn’t gas me?” she asked. Bucher sensed vaguely she was about to say something it was
better not to know. “You don’t have to tell me,” he declared. “But you can tell me if you want to. It doesn’t make any difference.”

“It does make a difference. I was seventeen. At that time I wasn’t as ugly as I am now. That’s why they let me live.”

“Yes,” said Bucher without understanding.

She looked at him. He saw for the first time that she had very transparent gray eyes. He had never noticed them before. “Don’t you understand what that means?” she asked.

“No.”

“They let me live because they needed women. Young ones—for the soldiers. For the Ukrainians, too, who were fighting with the Germans. Do you understand now?”

Bucher sat for a moment as though stupefied. Ruth watched him. “That’s what they did with you?” he asked finally. He didn’t look at her.

“Yes. That’s what they did with me.” She was no longer crying. “It isn’t true.”

“It is true.”

“I don’t mean it that way. I mean you didn’t want it.”

She broke into a short bitter laugh. “That makes no difference.”

Bucher now looked at her. Her face seemed to be bereft of all expression; but just this turned it into such a mask of suffering that he suddenly felt, and not only heard, that she was speaking the truth. He felt it as though it was tearing his stomach to pieces; yet at the same time he didn’t want to admit it, not yet—he wanted at this moment only one thing—that the face before him should change.

“It isn’t true,” he said. “You didn’t want it. You weren’t really there. You didn’t do it.”

Her glance returned from a void. “It is true. And one cannot forget it.”

“None of us knows what we can forget and what not. We all
have many things to forget. Otherwise we might as well stay here and die.”

Bucher had repeated something 509 had said the evening before. He swallowed several times. “You’re alive,” he then said with an effort.

“Yes, I’m alive. I move, I speak words, I eat bread which you throw over to me—and those other things live, too. They live! Live!”

She pressed her hands against her temples and turned her head. She’s looking at me, thought Bucher. She’s already looking at me again. She’s no longer talking only to the sky and the house on the hill.

“You’re alive,” he repeated, “and that is enough for me.”

She let her hands drop. “You child,” she said, disconsolate. “You child! What, after all, do you know?”

“I’m not a child. No one who’s been here is a child. Not even Karel, who is eleven.”

She shook her head. “I don’t mean that. You believe what you’re saying now. But it won’t last. Those other things will come back. With you and with me. The memories, later, when—”

Why did she tell me about it, thought Bucher. She shouldn’t have told me. Then I wouldn’t have known and it wouldn’t have existed. But maybe it’s better so. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said. “But I believe that for us there are rules that are different from the ordinary ones. There are men among us here in the camp who have killed people because it was necessary; and these men don’t consider themselves murderers—as little as a soldier at the front considers himself a murderer. They aren’t, either. It’s the same with us. What has happened to us cannot be measured by normal standards.”

“You’ll think differently about it once we’re out of here.”

She looked at him sadly. Suddenly he understood why she had
been so unusually dejected these last weeks. She had been afraid—afraid even of the liberation. “Ruth,” he said, and felt a sudden wave of heat rise behind his forehead. “It’s over. Forget it. You have been forced to do things you abhorred. What remains of it? Nothing!”

“I used to vomit,” she said slowly. “I vomited nearly every time, afterwards! At last they sent me away.” She kept looking at him. “That’s what you’ll have—gray hair, a mouth with a lot of teeth missing, and a whore.”

He started at the word and didn’t answer for a long time. “They have debased us all,” he said at last. “Not only you. All of us. All who are here, all who are in all the camps. You in your sex; all of us in our pride and in more than our pride; in our being human. They have trampled about on it, they have spat on it, and they have debased us so much it’s hard to understand how we’ve survived it. I’ve thought a great deal about it during these last weeks. I’ve also talked to 509 about it. They’ve done so many things—to me, too.”

“What?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. 509 says it isn’t true if one doesn’t acknowledge it inwardly. I didn’t understand him at first. But now I know what he means. I’m not a coward and you’re not a whore. All the things they did to us don’t mean anything as long as we don’t feel like it.”

“I feel like it.”

“You won’t, once you get out.”

“Even more.”

“No. If that were true, only a few of us would be able to go on living. They debased us; but it’s not we who are debased. It’s the others who did it.”

“Who said that?”

“Berger.”

“You have good teachers.”

“Yes—and I have learned a great deal.”

Ruth leaned her head to one side. Her face was tired. There was still suffering in it; but it was now more relaxed. “There are so many years,” she said. “There’ll be the life of every day—and then—”

Bucher watched the blue shadows of clouds pass over the hill and the white house. For a moment he was surprised that the house was still there. It seemed to him as though it should have been hit by a soundless bomb. But it was still there. “Shouldn’t we wait till we’re outside and have tried it before we despair?” he asked.

Ruth looked at her thin hands and thought of her gray hair and her missing teeth, and then she thought that for years Bucher had hardly seen a woman outside the camp. She was younger than he, but she felt many years older; knowledge weighed on her like lead. She didn’t believe any of those things which he anticipated with so much certainty—and yet in her, too, there was a last hope to which she clung. “Yes, Josef,” she said. “We should wait till then.”

She walked back to her barrack. Her dirty skirt flapped round her thin legs. Bucher’s eyes followed her and suddenly he felt rage rise in him like a boiling fountain. He knew he was helpless and that there was nothing he could do, and he also knew that he had to get over it, that he himself had to understand what he had said to Ruth. He stared at the ground. An ant was crawling over the earth. It dragged a dead beetle. The beetle was tiny but compared to the ant it was enormous. It depended on how you looked at it. It always depended on that.

Slowly he got up and walked to the barrack. He suddenly couldn’t stand the bright sky any longer.

NEUBAUER STARED
at the letter. Then he read the last paragraph again.

A Bavarian village was given as an address.

Neubauer gazed about him. He didn’t understand it. It couldn’t be true. They were bound to return at any moment. To leave him now—that was impossible! Where was the faith of the Nibelungen? Where the Germanic woman who fought side by side with her husband?

Clumsily he sat down in one of the French armchairs. The thing cracked. He got up, gave the chair a kick and let himself drop onto the sofa. That damned trash! Why on earth did he have that stuff rather than honest decent German furniture? It was for her sake he
had gotten it. She had read something about them and had thought they were precious and elegant. What had they to do with him—him, the rough, honest retainer of the Führer? He raised his leg for a second kick at the fragile chair but thought better of it. What was the good? One day maybe the stuff could be sold. But who’d think of buying art while the sound of the guns could be heard?