Page 39 of A Change of Skin

“Who Franz?”

  “You. I. We. Betty. I don’t know.”

  “Go on, Franz. Go on, güero. I’m listening.”

  They filed out of the receiving room, passed the guardroom, where the teletype could be heard tapping. Maloth appeared with a bundle of mail in his hand. He gave several letters to Franz, and the new shipment of prisoners moved on into the clothing room, where Wacholz measured each of them with his eyes and selected garments for them.

  “Jewish?”

  The man, robust and red-faced, shook his head. Wacholz looked at him again and handed him gray trousers with three red stripes down the side and a gray jacket with a red triangle on its back. The man started to undress, then stopped and looked at the women behind him. Wacholz stepped forward, jerked his fly open, and pulled his pants down.

  “Jewish?”

  “Yes.”

  Wacholz gave the girl a striped dress with a yellow star sewed on its shoulder. Silently she undressed. She remembered something and raised her arms and took out her hairpins. Her hair fell below her shoulders. She handed the hairpins to one of the guards. Franz watched from the door. The letters were in his hand. He opened one and pretended to read.

  “Jewish?”

  “No. No!”

  The youth faced Wacholz with his arms crossed as the girl finished slipping the striped dress over her shoulders and looked at him. Mechanically Wacholz handed the youth the uniform with the red stripes. Burian stepped out of the shadow and picked up a striped coat with a yellow star. He glanced mockingly at Wacholz and gave the jacket of the Jews to the youth.

  “It’s not true!” the boy yelled. He was blond and pale and now he stepped out of the line and touched the arm of the girl, who remained motionless. Now, as his face lifted, his eyes could be seen: one blue, the other brown. “It isn’t true. I’m only a third…”

  The girl was some other girl.

  “My mother did it. She thought I’d be safer here than at the front. So she made it up that I’m Jewish. To protect me!”

  And finally he saw her from in front. She did not look up. She made no response to the touch of the youth. She lowered her eyes to avoid seeing his, one brown and the other blue, staring at her imploringly.

  “Tell them,” the youth pleaded with her. “Tell them. You know all about it. I told you on the train.”

  Franz would have liked to have seen her earlier, one moment before she entered the little fortress of Terezin and changed her clothes, for now she was some other girl. And she wasn’t looking at him. She didn’t look at anyone. No, Isabel, at none of us. Maybe she would have looked at Ulrich. At Ulrich, if he had recognized her. But Ulrich had said “No” as she had just finished saying “Yes.” One night they came to our room, knocked on the door, woke us up, and took Ulrich away, precisely because he had said “No.”

  “I went back to Prague to look for her, Isabel.”

  “Weren’t they after you?”

  “No, they didn’t have time for that. I died, changed my name, came to America. Besides, no one cared about me. I had been a nothing, a nobody. What would have been the point of making an example of me? They neither tried me nor condemned nor absolved me. They didn’t care. And I made my life over again with the same indifference. History never flowed through me, Isabel. I just happened to be around.”

  When he finished building the crematorium, a new assignment awaited him. The fortress was now too small for the number of prisoners it contained. A new cell block was needed—immediately, sooner, as soon as possible. He drew up the plans and construction began in October 1943 and continued an entire year. But, Franz, there may be others who are still looking for you. You may still not be safe. I’ll never breathe a word of what you tell me. Don’t try to apologize, make excuses. Just hold me close and tell me about my face and eyes, about Elizabeth’s blood. Be patient and we will be together again. Rub my hair, Franz.

  They walk across an open space between buildings. It is eleven at night now. They line up again. The barber, a Greek prisoner, is ready. One by one they undress and get into the five tubs filled with viscous cresyl, while twenty guards look on. Their eyes smart from the disinfectant. They get out and are made to stand against the wall and the barber comes with his scissors and clippers and razor. Their heads shaved, they stand facing the wall. Now they are mechanically holding hands and their eyes are shut so that they will not see each other. The barber sweeps up their fallen hair and gives it to a guard, for everything can be used, nothing is wasted.

  “Of course it’s to our credit,” chuckled the Commandant. “It’s a proof of the good order we’ve maintained. It will take care of the accusations that have been made against us. Here we have freedom. Freedom, art, music, eh?”

  And during the banquet that followed the ceremony of pinning on the decorations, the Commandant stood and proposed a toast. He said that this day would be engraved in letters of gold in the annals of the Terezin garrison. He was seated beside Eichmann. Eichmann asked quietly about the performance that would conclude the activities of the day.

  “The musicians from the Jewish community have prepared a concert,” said the Commandant.

  “Good. Do you know the program?”

  “Of course. Nothing happens here without my knowing it.”

  The construction of the new cell block proceeded at top speed and in one year the building was ready for occupancy, although the roof was not yet finished. Franz had provided five large communal cells on the left, each with a capacity of a hundred and sixty prisoners, each with three basins, two toilets, and a single window. On the right were the eighteen solitary confinement cells. The execution wall behind, like the stage of an amphitheater. It was well, efficiently planned. Soukop was in charge of the Baukommando: hundreds of Jewish prisoners. With them Franz had nothing to do; he merely planned and supervised. A year’s work. He works an entire year and his eyes are those of a man relentlessly searching, seeking, following as he moves through the straight and slanted spaces, undulant yet stable, of that artificial universe, of that spider’s world where the steel webs are the electric fences charged at high tension that she passed through, in the beginning, in the morning on her way to work at the I. G. Farben factory in Monovice; out beneath the stone door above which grass grows as if the fortress were underground, a labyrinth of galleries sunken beneath the brown surface of the earth, and by day he seeks her as he walks the triple corridor of the solitary confinement cells in that world that must mean more than its stone and brick say, that world where she lives and some day has to appear among the bloodless, shaven, emaciated faces that are so strange yet so hauntingly similar to some presentiment or some memory drawn stark in black and white without shading, faces that drink the coal-dark water and the pale vegetable soup and every morning at seven line up before marching off to be freed by labor; he searches for her among the toothless gums that gnaw potatoes and beets, among the naked bodies that lie down at night after removing sweat-drenched, rain-drenched clothing that tomorrow must be worn again, shining brightness, his flashlight in his hand, upon them for any pretext, no pretext, light upon the sleeping faces of the women stretched on the board beds, and again, in daylight, he looks among them as they riot in silence before the only toilet in the cell, a hundred and twenty women and a single basin, and her green eyes have to move, as his own do, hurriedly across the gray buildings and the frost-covered walls that must symbolize something, must be trying to say something, to offer some kind of faith in some kind of order in the midst of this lunatic maze where his eyes stare and seek and search for her before it is too late and the face he remembers is lost forever among the brick walls and the garages and the mud-deep trenches and pits and the make-believe, stagelike backdrops of the dog kennels and the baths of wood and the garbage heaps and the infirmaries and stables, while every day another feature of that face he remembers will be eroding, decaying, disappearing until she will be lost forever in a straw mattress or a wooden tub or the blank negation of a walled-up window; h
e hears her yell among the women dancing beneath the freezing shower, he searches after her in a world that because it is its own fiction resists all other imagination: all Terezin, the fields, the buildings, the ghetto, is the reply of a free and disembodied imagination to the slavedom of reality: this is not reality but a nightmare or a nightmare representation of reality through which he searches for her, sometimes feverishly, at other times coldly and restrained, among the stained mattresses on the excrement-smeared floors of the infirmary, among the lice in the eyelashes and eyebrows of the men, women, and children dead from typhus who have been thrown into the common pit dug beside the Ohre River where the guards leap in on all fours and with pliers and knives pick out gold-filled teeth before the river filters into the grave and the dead breathe that water which, because they are dead, can no longer infect them with its pestilence. He searches for her in the garrison garden, where a few women work cultivating vegetables; and beyond, to the right, where the morgue stands small and dark on its mound of brown earth. He searches for her among the Czech maids at the Herrenhaus at Christmas when the officers of the garrison stroll between the hedges along the graveled paths carrying their gifts and go inside to exchange toasts with the Commandant and admire the Chinese-lacquered furniture and listen to the latest news on the radio and peer nostalgically at the framed landscape prints and listen to Wagner and set down their glasses of brandy on the glass-top tables. And in the women’s section he lashes his whip against his heel and orders them to look up and give him their names as they paint wooden buttons and sew arch supports for boots and knit soldiers’ socks and clean the rooms and offices: Gertrude Schön, Herr Architekt, Karolina Simon, Theresa Lederova, but it is forbidden to give names, Herr Architekt, here we all have numbers. And he tries, raving, to enter the hospital before he forgets her face forever, before it can be wiped away forever by the cresyl and Formalin, the injections of sea water, the experiments with typhus and skin grafts, the transformations and exchanges of faces and hands and buttocks shuffled around in this laboratory where the entire universe is reordered, transplanted freely, without limit, to fulfill the image and semblance of an unspeakable and irrepeatable yet ultimately possible dream.

  “I promise you that you will find the evening pleasant,” said the Commandant.

  When the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia was assassinated, it was decreed that the lives of three thousand Jews must be given in exchange for his. Heinrich came to Theresienstadt to organize their transport to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Treblinka. As always he was very confident and very lucid. He and Franz walked through the square of the ghetto town with their thumbs hooked in their belts and Heinrich laughed recalling that fight years ago at the students’ party Herr Urs, the dwarf, had crashed wrapped in a pillowcase and refrigerator frost. Franz laughed too, and Heinrich, winking, said that Franz might yet find himself in some difficulties because of the costume Ulrich had worn that night. They walked side by side and laughed a great deal and Heinrich said that no matter how the war turned out it could never be denied that at last German life had been reduced to rationality and exalted to greatness. What they were inflicting on others they risked having inflicted upon themselves, and if that should happen, they would accept it without protest. For in the end human existence is a lonely and bitter footrace which does not go to the fleet or to the daring or even to the patient but to those who have a vision of their own possible grandeur and the courage to live up to their vision. The secret of Germany was that each individual German had such a vision of himself, alone, solitary. It was the accomplishment of the Third Reich to have organized those secret and hidden visions of solitude into a common national purpose, exalted and sufficient. They all had that sense of exaltation. Because of it, if they were defeated, they would be able to accept not only defeat, not only death, but even humiliation. In a few days Heinrich finished his mission. The Attentat auf Heydrich transport was efficiently organized and the three thousand Jews departed from the Theresienstadt ghetto, never, Heinrich assured Franz, to be seen again.

  “And what if some day you find yourself in the hands of the Americans or the Russians?” Franz asked, smiling, as Heinrich boarded his truck.

  Heinrich threw his hand to his visored cap in mockery of an American salute.

  “Then I’ll become an American or a Russian,” he laughed. “I’ll turn traitor, I’ll sell secrets, I’ll swap parties. Treu bis zum Tod!”

  The truck pulled off and Franz laughed too and swung his arm up to return the salute.

  Huic ergo pace, Deus:

  Pie Jesus Domine:

  Dona eis requiem. Amen.

  “The Jews,” said the Commandant casually, picking a tooth and covering his mouth with the other hand, “are going to perform Verdi’s Requiem.”

  Eichmann lifted an eyebrow. All the officers at the long table stopped their conversations. The Commandant went on picking his tooth in the frozen silence. Finally Eichmann began to laugh. He slapped his open palm on the tablecloth and laughed, and they all imitated him, slapped the table, each other’s shoulders, and laughed. The whole room laughed, those sitting far away not sure of the joke, merely doing what those who were nearer did. Eichmann wiped tears from his eyes.

  And she, if she had ever talked with Franz, could have told him that for months Raphael Schachter had no basso. Just when he was becoming desperate, one day as he was walking the streets of the ghetto thanks to the freedom granted him and his artists he heard a diabolic voice floating over his head. She was with Schachter, and when he asked her if she heard the same thing, she nodded and smiled. They walked from one end of the street to the other, searching, listening, becoming more certain and elated all the time. Finally they climbed wooden stairs in a house where children were playing in the halls and walked through empty bedrooms. The voice sounded closer and closer, and Schachter climbed out a tall window on to the roof and she followed and they saw a lean man dressed in black bent over a chimney, singing. He looked at them. He moved away from the chimney and wiped a hand across his soot-blackened face. They had found the basso for the Requiem.

  You laughed, Pussycat, lying with your soft protecting arms around Franz in your room in the hotel in Cholula. But afterward you would tell yourself that that night he had talked without knowing what he was saying to you, sometimes breaking into tears as they all break into tears when they go back at last, when they come at last to the end of the time of waiting and return to their towns and cities and discover that no one has waited for them.

  And she understood everything when the general rehearsal was held and there was no spirit, no life, no enthusiasm. Schachter believed that he had failed. They had not responded to him, they had not understood his purposes. She took his arm, moving with difficulty because of her stomach, and told him no, they were not indifferent or resentful. It was simply shock, astonishment, astonishment.

  “So the Jews are going to sing their own death chant!” said Eichmann, and everyone laughed and went on laughing as they made their way to the enormous improvised concert hall beneath the roof of the building that had been a hospital, and took their places, the ranking officers in the first row of chairs and the others and the enlisted guards crowded in behind and Franz in one of the last seats of all. And on the other side of the curtain the soloists and the chorus and the orchestra were ready and waiting and Epstein was telling Schachter once again that he was dubious, very dubious of everything, he feared that it could well be construed as a capitulation. A messenger came from the Commandant with an order: the performance must last no longer than one hour. Schachter clenched his teeth and in a whisper told them, “We shall begin with the line ‘Confutatis maledictis.’” Then the curtain opened and in front of them were the officers newly decorated with the KVK cross, smiling.

  Confutatis maledictis,

  Flammis acribus addictis,

  Voca me cum benedictis.

  Beneath the silent vault rose the voice of the basso chimney sweep. When the damned are con
founded and cast into the living flames, call me to join the blessed. Franz saw her. She was seated on the conductor’s right, playing first violin. The voice of the chorus, loud yet hesitant in the “Dies Irae.” He could not see her clearly, nor could he see Eichmann’s eyebrow and smile and the Commandant’s air of complacent satisfaction. There was no conviction in the chorus: the day of wrath would come and the world would dissolve in ashes … perhaps. Franz leaned forward and twisted his head to see the girl playing the violin, to see her and ask her to remember a different Requiem, a German Requiem: grant us rest, Lord; would she remember? Two groups of cellos, separated by somber violas. The chorus at its softest, in lamentation. But the human voice, simply because it is human, creates a certain joy that moves in front of the sadness of the instruments. Schachter had his back to them. He had closed his eyes. Now the officers and the SS men knew that he had been defeated, that his people had been defeated; and the reason for their defeat, whether it was fear or indifference or astonishment, was of no importance. The girl playing the violin kept her eyes fixed on Schachter. She compelled him to look at her. She played exactly as he wanted, with the intensity and purpose he was asking of her. But now her face was resigned. Eichmann, listening intently, smiled. But at that instant, as if he had understood the full meaning of the resignation on the face of the girl, his smile changed from dry amusement to a gentler expression almost of forgiveness. And Franz, far back in the hall, remembered their nights in the Wallenstein Gardens in Prague, remembered a face that resembled the face of the girl playing the violin, and wanted to re-create that other Requiem, the Requiem of Brahms, to hear it rather than this one. The voices of the women repeated what the voices of the men had said. They attempt to recapture life. Memory tries to find its way, its path down the honed edge of the blade between life and death. But life, death, and memory fuse. The chorus is silent for a moment while Schachter’s arms move and the four soloists stand. Bietya, the soprano, softly begins the “Domine Jesu Christe, Rex Gloriae,” and Franz wants to reject those words as he murmurs the words of the German Requiem, Der Tod ist verschlungen in den Sieg, Tod, wo ist dein Stachel! and the sound of the instruments is overcome by the words: in that other orchestra, the horn gives life to the march, the violins and violas walk beside the mourners, and the organ stops everything. But he could not remember it. The Latin voices, almost unaccompanied, voices alone, slow voices, less solid than echoes, prevented memory. The tenor: