first she was jolly but as the days went by her distress grew. One Sunday, for instance, I had promised to see her. She had phoned the Osteria, left a message with Werlin to say she was waiting to hear from me. I was not there, of course. I had gone to Feldafing, and when Hoffmann invited me to coffee and dinner I told him where to stuff it. The silly girl waited for me all through the night. The Hoffmanns had even given her a ticket for the Venetian Night that evening, but she didn’t go.
Her diary became increasingly confused. I am utterly miserable, she wrote, the little slut, as if she could know true misery!
I
had been on the Front. Eva threatened to buy more sleeping powders.
He only needs me for certain purposes, she wrote.
Later I invited her to dinner at the Four Seasons. At the end of it, I gave her an envelope with some money.
A few days later the stupid whore Frau Hoffmann told Eva I had found a replacement for her, called Valkyrie.
On 28th May she took thirty-five sleeping pills and tried to kill herself but she failed.
The stupid whore! She could not even kill herself successfully.
The whole thing was a pathetic ploy, a cry for my attention. Well, I suppose she did get it, after all. I have always had a soft spot for a plump bit of dumpling and no mistake.
* * *
In another time and place Shomer lies dreaming and tries to forget.
In memory there’s no escape.
He remembers them fleetingly, in jumbled fragments. Avrom’s dark curls gleaming in candlelight, Bina’s laughter as he made faces at her and she snorted like a certain treife animal; their smell when they were babies, in those sleepless days when he sat by his typewriter morning and night churning out tales of Yiddishe gangsters and chaste girls with a wild heart hidden within, of bloodied murders and anti-Semite conspiracies and of detectives who walked the cold streets in search of a justice they knew to be an illusion – in those early days when the babies cried and Fanya feeding and the shouts of merchants outside silenced by snow, and a fire burning, and his fingers on the warm hard keys, and the smell of milk, of babies, everywhere in the house, and in everything he touched, and in his clothes – those were the happiest days of his life, he realised, and you only learn that too late, when they are vanished like smoke.
Those are the moments he wishes to burn like the pages of a manuscript. To see them consumed by flame so he would never have to see them or remember them or how they were, their smell eradicated for ever. He resents Fanya when she appears to him, unexpectedly, in unguarded moments; he resents her for leaving him. He wants her gone from his mind the way she had left this world, so abruptly: one moment they were together a family, and the next the man severed them with his horsewhip, they to go one way and he the other. They to the ovens, he to the work units. And he didn’t know, they didn’t know, Fanya held Avrom and Bina’s hands and looked back at him as they parted, and her lips tried to form a smile. ‘You will see each other again, they are only going to the showers, to be washed,’ a soldier said, a voice lacking in emotion, and an old man masticating toothless gums said mournfully, ‘Auschwitz, Auschwitz, what is this Auschwitz?’
He is angry at them not for leaving him but for coming back. They come from a world that no longer exists and has no right to intrude upon his present. Auschwitz, Auschwitz: there is only Auschwitz.
‘Do you remember?’ is a sentence never spoken, it is
verboten
, a transgression against the now. There is only now, no past, no future, there is only Auschwitz, an island floating on the Polish ground. The dead rise in black ash into the sky, day and night the ovens burn, day and night the trains come laden. And Shomer’s mind retreats into itself, the way it had when he was still a man. For he had been a writer of
shund
, of pulp, for
Haynt
and other publishers.
Her diary became increasingly confused. I am utterly miserable, she wrote, the little slut, as if she could know true misery!
I
had been on the Front. Eva threatened to buy more sleeping powders.
He only needs me for certain purposes, she wrote.
Later I invited her to dinner at the Four Seasons. At the end of it, I gave her an envelope with some money.
A few days later the stupid whore Frau Hoffmann told Eva I had found a replacement for her, called Valkyrie.
On 28th May she took thirty-five sleeping pills and tried to kill herself but she failed.
The stupid whore! She could not even kill herself successfully.
The whole thing was a pathetic ploy, a cry for my attention. Well, I suppose she did get it, after all. I have always had a soft spot for a plump bit of dumpling and no mistake.
* * *
In another time and place Shomer lies dreaming and tries to forget.
In memory there’s no escape.
He remembers them fleetingly, in jumbled fragments. Avrom’s dark curls gleaming in candlelight, Bina’s laughter as he made faces at her and she snorted like a certain treife animal; their smell when they were babies, in those sleepless days when he sat by his typewriter morning and night churning out tales of Yiddishe gangsters and chaste girls with a wild heart hidden within, of bloodied murders and anti-Semite conspiracies and of detectives who walked the cold streets in search of a justice they knew to be an illusion – in those early days when the babies cried and Fanya feeding and the shouts of merchants outside silenced by snow, and a fire burning, and his fingers on the warm hard keys, and the smell of milk, of babies, everywhere in the house, and in everything he touched, and in his clothes – those were the happiest days of his life, he realised, and you only learn that too late, when they are vanished like smoke.
Those are the moments he wishes to burn like the pages of a manuscript. To see them consumed by flame so he would never have to see them or remember them or how they were, their smell eradicated for ever. He resents Fanya when she appears to him, unexpectedly, in unguarded moments; he resents her for leaving him. He wants her gone from his mind the way she had left this world, so abruptly: one moment they were together a family, and the next the man severed them with his horsewhip, they to go one way and he the other. They to the ovens, he to the work units. And he didn’t know, they didn’t know, Fanya held Avrom and Bina’s hands and looked back at him as they parted, and her lips tried to form a smile. ‘You will see each other again, they are only going to the showers, to be washed,’ a soldier said, a voice lacking in emotion, and an old man masticating toothless gums said mournfully, ‘Auschwitz, Auschwitz, what is this Auschwitz?’
He is angry at them not for leaving him but for coming back. They come from a world that no longer exists and has no right to intrude upon his present. Auschwitz, Auschwitz: there is only Auschwitz.
‘Do you remember?’ is a sentence never spoken, it is
verboten
, a transgression against the now. There is only now, no past, no future, there is only Auschwitz, an island floating on the Polish ground. The dead rise in black ash into the sky, day and night the ovens burn, day and night the trains come laden. And Shomer’s mind retreats into itself, the way it had when he was still a man. For he had been a writer of
shund
, of pulp, for
Haynt
and other publishers.
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