It was late afternoon, and Oskar and Goeth sat in the salon of Goeth’s white villa. Goeth’s girlfriend Majola looked in, a small-boned woman, a secretary at the Wagner factory in town. She did not spend her days amid the excesses of
[email protected]@ow. She had sensitive manners, and this delicacy helped a rumor to emerge that Majola had threatened not to sleep with Goeth if he continued arbitrarily gunning people down. But no one knew whether that was the truth or just one of those therapeutic interpretations which arise in the minds of prisoners desperate to make the earth habitable.
Majola did not stay long with Amon and Oskar that afternoon. She could tell there would be a drinking session. Helen Hirsch, the pale girl in black who was Amon’s maid, brought them the necessary accompaniments—cakes, canap‘es, sausage. She reeled with exhaustion. Last night Amon had beaten her for preparing food for Majola without his permission; this morning he had made her run up and down the villa’s three flights of stairs fifty times on the double because of a flyspeck on one of the paintings in the corridor. She had heard certain rumors about Herr Schindler but had not met him until now. This afternoon she took no comfort from the sight of these two big men, seated either side of the low table, fraternal and in apparent concord. There was nothing here to interest her, for the certainty of her own death was a first premise. She thought only about the survival of her young sister, who worked in the camp’s general kitchen. She kept a sum of money hidden in the hope that it would effect her sister’s survival. There was no sum, she believed, no deal, that could influence her own prospects.
So they drank through the camp’s twilight and into the dark. Long after the prisoner Tosia Lieberman’s nightly rendition of Brahms’s “Lullaby” had calmed the women’s camp and insinuated itself between the timbers of the men’s, the two big men sat on. Their prodigious livers glowed hot as furnaces. And at the right hour, Oskar leaned across the table and, acting out of an amity which, even with this much cognac aboard, did not go beyond the surface of the skin ... Oskar, leaning toward Amon and cunning as a demon, began to tempt him toward restraint.
Amon took it well. It seemed to Oskar that
he was attracted by the thought of moderation—a
temptation worthy of an emperor. Amon could
imagine a sick slave on the trolleys, a
returning prisoner from the cable factory, staggering
--in that put-upon way one found so hard to tolerate—under a load of clothing or lumber picked up at the prison gate. And the fantasy ran with a strange warmth in Amon’s belly that he would forgive that laggard, that pathetic actor. As Caligula might have been tempted to see himself as Caligula the Good, so the image of Amon the Good exercised the Commandant’s imagination for a time. He would, in fact, always have a weakness for it. Tonight, his blood running golden with cognac and nearly all the camp asleep beyond his steps, Amon was more definitely seduced by mercy than by the fear of reprisal. But in the morning he would remember Oskar’s warning and combine it with the day’s news that Russian threats were developing on the Front at Kiev. Stalingrad had been an inconceivable distance from
[email protected]@ow. But the distance to Kiev was imaginable.
For some days after Oskar’s bout with Amon, news came to Emalia that the dual temptation was having its result with the Commandant. Dr. Sedlacek, going back to Budapest, would report to Samu Springmann that Amon had given up, for the time being at least, arbitrarily murdering people. And gentle Samu, among the diverse cares he had in the list of places from Dachau and Drancy in the west to Sobibor and
[email protected] in the east, hoped for a time that the hole at
[email protected]@ow had been plugged.
But the allure of clemency vanished quickly.
If there was a brief respite, those who were
to survive and give testimony of their days in
[email protected]@ow would not be aware of it. The summary
assassinations would seem continual to them. If
Amon did not appear on his balcony this morning
or the next, it did not mean he would not appear the
morning after that. It took much more than Goeth’s
temporary absence to give even the most deluded
prisoner some hope of a fundamental change in the
Commandant’s nature. And then, in any case,
there he would be, on the steps in the
Austrian-style cap he wore to murders,
looking through his binoculars for a culprit.
Dr. Sedlacek would return to Budapest not
only with overly hopeful news of a reform in
Amon but with more reliable data on the camp at
[email protected]@ow. One afternoon a guard from Emalia
turned up at
[email protected]@ow to summon Stern
to Zablocie. Once Stern arrived at the
front gate, he was led upstairs into Oskar’s
new apartment. There Oskar introduced him to two
men in g