Lea of Leuwarden

Arnot Lustig

"Yes," she encouraged me.

"Yes," I let myself be encouraged.

"I’d like to tell you that I’ll be with you for a long time," she said. And then: "But it wouldn’t be the truth."

"I’d like to tell you that I’ll stay with you forever if you’ll be nice to me, if you won’t forget about me," she continued.

"Yes," I whispered.

"But it wouldn’t be the truth," she said again. "Nobody loves anybody else more than himself." There was a pause. Then she said, "Do you want to have a baby with me?"

"It’s fine the way it is now," I whispered again. "That’s all there is."

"It has to be fine," she said.

Then she told me to come nearer, as close as I could get to her, and let her get as close as she could to me. "Closer—the closest you can," she said.

I caressed her face, her forehead, and her hair with both my hands, connected by my body in her body, by my soul or part of my soul with hers. It formed something that was beyond time or the dimension we were in, something that compacted and accelerated everything. Instinct told me all that was good or not so good about her. I could not only see it with my eyes but I also breathed it in, from her whisper to all her touches combined, just like from each one alone. They all merged into something as all-embracing as light, the sun, or the stars. Her face looked like it was made out of porcelain and it was prettier than I had ever seen it before. Making love had softened and colored it, endowing her with a new beauty. She glistened with sweat. Both of us were changed. I placed the tip of my finger on her throat and felt her pulse, her blood throbbing. Her skin was warm, heated by fear and expectation. Her nakedness made her seem defenseless, just like it makes a man look stronger. I looked for the strength in her weakness, weakness in her strength. She had always resembled a beautiful animal—one that had strayed too far and perhaps already knew that it would never find its way home again. The sense it made was beautiful and sad at the same time because it couldn’t last, even if we could have drawn it out forever.

Naked, she reached perfection. I didn’t need light to see that. Smooth, tight skin covered her shoulders, head and face, her breasts down to her waist and belly, hips and thighs. Her body expressed everything for her, just as did her open eyes, her erect breasts and her warm lap, the tender, winding mazes of her small ears and her face that had not lost its pain, fatigue, and yearning. Her body was the picture of one single thought. There wasn’t any now or never anymore yet at the same time, now and never composed the moment; that now, here and omnipresent never.

I had never seen a more beautiful being either before or after. But that was already different to me, too. I stroked the real her inside. And just like no one can ever get back home again after being away for a long time, even if his home hasn’t changed in the meantime and he hasn’t either, and how things would never be the way they had been up to that moment, Lea had transformed with the approaching daylight into someone I didn’t know, maybe somebody she didn’t even know herself. Was she crying? I couldn’t tell; I only knew her eyes were wet. She whispered something that I didn’t understand: How much can a person care for another person? What makes him like or dislike himself? How can he give another person a little pleasure or a piece of himself—or all his pleasure?

She was different from the way she’d been yesterday, from last night and now. Maybe I was different from last night, too. We were strangers and at the same time, we were no longer unfamiliar to each other. I sensed her chest and heart speaking to me with each beat. The rest of her was an eighteen year old, possibly immortal, but tired spirit. A memory of a memory; a here and now that never carries over to tomorrow. We had already gotten used to being people without a future. The place between life and death was a new center with uncharted borders, something that was merely between yes and no, a lengthy meantime, that perhaps meant waiting but without the slightest hope. We already knew that hope meant fullness and hopelessness emptiness, and we no longer had anything more than our bodies and souls and a piece of the night until morning would come. She soaked up my patience and impatience. She couldn’t have known what was going on inside of me. She edged up to my tenseness like an invisible wall and let her mouth open slightly in anticipation and invitation. Her lips were warm and moist and held the taste of wine drunk long ago or juice or thirst. The sun that looked out of her eyes was not rising but setting. Timelessly. I wanted it to be the other way around but it wasn’t. They would probably cut off the strands of golden hair that had fallen on her forehead as early as tomorrow or the day after. She licked her lips and kissed me gently, lightly, and wetly in her incomparable way. Her kiss coursed through me, softening and pervading my whole body like blood.

She was unique, just like every woman is, like every person is. She started stroking my hips, my thighs and my groin again with her palms. She touched me swiftly, with experience, saying nothing. The dark had lost its strength. It would be light in a little bit.

"You are beautiful," I said again, very close to her.

"You’re beautiful, too," she answered in a whisper. She continued, close to my face, "beautiful in how you want to see things better than they really are, in what love has taught you or hasn’t taught you yet—in how you’re young, barely grown-up. For the little hatred that I’ve seen in you even if you speak about it. For the childish desire you have to get revenge. For your silly sense of fairness. How you warm me as if I was going to freeze any second. The way you touch me; how and why you came to see me."

Her words contained everything that was and would be; what hadn’t happened and never would again.

"This is the last time, here and now, that you’ll look the way you do and be the way you are," she whispered. "How you could be with me or without me; how I could be myself too."

She kept touching me. She didn’t have to convince herself anymore. She was ready for me, as much and as many times as I would be ready for her.

Then we were together, beyond the world of thoughts, but not their echo, by something that joins mutual consent and desire and longing and which no one understands. The way a person is still an animal but at the same time himself; what is made of him with someone who takes him in as if he was accepting himself. I sensed what stood for her last proof of freedom, what made her body hers so that she was allowed to decide what and how and with whom she would be. The way in which she could retain her dignity and still be what she was. Was this the last free choice she had before they forced her to go someplace where the words freedom or choice don’t exist—a place where all a person tries to do is survive, only survive, without any idea for how long and at what price?

She embraced me yet again. The strength in her arms, chest, hips, and lips joined with mine. It was a gentle, tender power. Then she spread herself open like a fissure running through stone, like a mouth opening. The light dawn brings flooded her with rays which slipped all over her skin. The moon had long moved to the morning side of the sky. She held me with parted lips and her eyes wide. I held her the same way in my arms before the streak of morning swelled.

Her beauty was like light and dark, twilight and daybreak that touch and swallow each other. She was dazzling in the way nature is dazzling, like the sun, the stars, and the forest, like mountains and abysses. The grasp I felt from within her a man could dream about until he dies. Or only dream. We were the same in everything else. All of a sudden what we were doing didn’t have anything in common with how she didn’t want to give someone pleasure or how she wanted to stop or spoil the act or pretend like it wasn’t happening; how she never acted like a customer of hers thought she would or how they wanted her to. She left me to figure her out on my own. Neither her nervousness nor implacability bothered me anymore. I knew she couldn’t be only one person. No one is ever just one person. Maybe my presence made her become aware of things she didn’t want to think of in spite of the daylight, to see and hear things she no longer wanted to think about. I heard her exhale deeply, then sob and start crying.

I remembered what my older friend of sorts, Vili Feld, the man who was the reason I had come to her, had said (and how the two thoughtful creases about the ridge of his nose had almost taken on an expression of fury), that she was hysterical and neurotic in a thousand ways that almost wiped out what was good about her and how there was no way of knowing what to do when she got crazy. It had always astounded him and he could have done without it.

She wanted to see me in the morning light. I did, too. I didn’t tell her how pretty she was anymore; she could read it by the expression on my face, by the way I was smiling. Did she want me to sing to her? She languored in her beauty like someone who inhabits a world they leave and come back to, a world in which they either get older or take with them on their way to destruction. She had the look of a cave where the only light comes in the morning when the stars are leaving. Her beauty was like a smoldering sun, a waning moon. I took in the parts of her body that she bared and what she showed only to me. I already knew from one of the camp inmates called Black Joe about the difference between somebody being naked for everybody or just for one person. She was naked only for me. In that moment it meant everything.

I felt what people feel when they are happy when something has happened. I knew what I had achieved even if the part of her with Vili Feld’s name on it wasn’t as big as I had thought it had been. He wasn’t the only thing I was trying to live up to anymore. He paled in retrospect. Something in me had evened up with him. Maybe I matured in that moment, by one of those thousands of invisible steps towards being old, through new experiences on the passage to death. Some shifts come all at once, unexpectedly. Didn’t I know that even they can be beautiful? There were probably a thousand ways a person could go to his death and what had happened was my way. Something that was only mine became a part of all the others. Vili Feld moved from the front of my mind to the back. Lea’s face had remained calm and serious through it all.

I could only catch part of what her expression and breath meant. Her touches. The beautiful body of Lea from Leuwarden; her entire figure and a little bit of her dying soul that she had committed to me. The flesh that first revels in and then regurgitates it all back out like prehistoric creatures that ingested and excreted everything through their mouths.

She slowly repeated what she wanted from me. "More, more."

"Yes."

"Everything."

"Yes."

"Yes."

"Everything." We could have each been speaking for ourselves or for one another and everything we said had more than one meaning. I was capable of dying in that moment and so was she. The feeling poured through my blood and my breath brought it back to life.

And then suddenly all she did was sob, like women do. She was crying and happy at the same time. I became conscious of her breath and mouth, her teeth, tongue and lips. It was a hot, all-stirring wave that rids the world of everything that is not here and now. Then everything was just noises again, movements and silence. Closed and half-opened eyes. Parted lips, touching each other like the wings of a butterfly touch the wind, like rocks attached to each other and time to all its ages, like a single second or a fraction of one.

"Nobody can take this away from us," I whispered. "Not even all the owners of the world put together: Germans, the authorities, the powerful—not even us."

"It’s only here and now."

"Why?"

"Don’t say anything."

"Yes."

"Not a word."

She whispered it into my face so closely that I could hardly hear her. "You’re only free if you are an animal. You’re alive because you live how you want, with whom you want. Nobody tells you what to do or what and how to go after something. You’re a part of the world and outside of it too. It doesn’t matter to you if you die or are born. Indifference runs through you like the heat of an animal. You only know what is, not what isn’t."

Did I want more than that? Maybe I did, maybe not. And Lea? I don’t know. It took over the moment that our time had filled, the moment we had touched beyond time. We were the exception to everything that had happened. In that way we were joined by the best that a man and a woman have for each other. She didn’t have to say any of the things she didn’t want to say and what she had to say before like so many other people whose word was penetrated by a lie to such a great extent that the lie cast a shadow on the truth at the same time it swallowed it and always split the soul of everyone in two. The fact that everybody’s soul had become a combination of truth and its opposite, which gave a two-sided face to everyone’s existence and didn’t matter anymore.

I didn’t have the strength or intention to argue or contradict her. She couldn’t do the same to me either. She didn’t look like she was dying. Then she mounted me again like I had mounted her body and everything started again because nothing had stopped—and for a little while she granted me the greatness that only a woman can give a man, even if he is just barely maturing in that moment and maybe, just for that reason. For a few moments it seemed like a non-moving race, the meeting of two bodies erasing guilt and innocence, skin, hearts, and souls touching. Fear evaporated in it. What had only been in the stars up to that moment was now on earth, here. How a person is fated to another. What he was born for. The moment when everything is and is not, many times larger, many times more evident, but always for the two who are touching. It was a moment when two people seem as inseparable as they were yesterday, and how they would be strangers to each other in a little while again.

"You are alive," I said. "You are beautiful."

"I am alive," she repeated. "Maybe."

"You can believe me."

"I know what it’s like."

"Tell me."

"If you don’t have hope, you don’t expect anything. Good is bad and worse the worst you get."

"It’s not like that," I objected. "It’s like a line that you hold on to. Some invisible road that you don’t know about yet."

"You and I," she said.

"You and I were two people just like all the you’s and I’s of all the people who have existed up to that moment everywhere on earth, and it joined us with them, and with the people who would one day exist until the end of human time."

"I’m living and dying at the same time—I can’t help it," she said. "And sometimes I’m not dying but I don’t live like I am right now. All I can do is scream. And I’m ashamed of it. Not only because of the people next door. I’m hysterical."

And then she said, "Sometimes you only do what you really want until the very end. You know what I mean."

We were naked like a river and water. With everything that was, is, and would be, the way a person sets the animal inside himself free or tames it; the animal that always comes back to him, that makes his heart expand or become smaller. How his heart is bigger than he is himself.

"There is nothing left that either one of us has to do," she said.

"What do you mean?"

"That burning feeling and lack of satisfaction," she answered. "Pain and painlessness. A day that is longer than a year and a second longer than eternity."

I knew what she was talking about right then: about a madness that is either under or out of control; about the time when we all go mad.

"Desire and tenderness. A touch of selfishness. Maybe that’s really the sense of it all," she said. Then she added, "One time, a friend of yours taught me that not even the best or the most beautiful body is enough for a woman to be a man’s lover. You probably know what I’m trying to say." Then: "Colors come over me every time and then I know it’s for real. Dark red, purple, orange. Dark blue. They shoot through the border between my heart and brain into every little part of my body. And then I start sweating all along my back and over my breasts. I can’t help but scream, I’m sorry. It’s like the dark coming into color, where everything shines before I go out again."

After it was over she said, "You can do. . .everything. . .and so can I." She exhaled. "A person will do anything when there’s nobody watching."

I touched her with my mouth. She touched me with hers. Within, she was bare and rosy. She was everything she had been before she’d been born, before her mother conceived her and before her father betrayed them in the last camp. She was everything for as far back in the past as she would be in the future, like the fresh leaves of trees, fruit, rosy petals. The scent of her body and sin mixed with the clean bed she had slept in last. She told me that a man smells like the boy of the woman who last held him in her arms and from the chest down he smells like fallen apples and mild vinegar or weak wine that a few drops of sea water has been added to, or like the rusty water a woman drinks from an iron mug. I thought about how a woman smells like a man’s hands, his chest, and his groin. Like the scent of children. Like strong wine. And how a woman’s lap and breasts smell just like her mouth.

She no longer had to hide the things in her that were superior under a mask that didn’t suit her or anybody else either. We were better off without the pretty hypocrisies that got passed off as sincerity. She was better for what she had done for me and for herself, and for what she had gotten only from herself and what she had been able to give away. This was the true innocence. It was composed of both our scents mixed perhaps with green poison that newborns sometimes accidentally swallow during birth. She had taken me in like a woman accepting a victim. She spoke with her mouth but her body was a mouth, too. It cleaned me. I have no idea how long it lasted.

She lay gazing at the sky through the window that jutted out from the sloping roof. Her body and eyes themselves were open doors another person could pass through and never look back. The sky brightened. A short streak set the clouds off from each other. In a little while the sky would become a brilliant blue, the sun gold; it was everything that lasts and passes away. Eternity. I thought about the rain and the blue sky, the mountains and flatlands, trees and meadows, about the world that was somewhere and which we would get a look at on our journey to the east.

"So now you’ve seen a star fall," she said.

"It granted my wish," I added.

Her voice sounded deeper, like when you wake up early in the morning and rasp.

The sky covered an emptiness that set it apart from the earth. That secret, heavenly river that had not been holy for a long time. It was heading toward an unknown sea with us in tow. The incomprehensible or indestructible and at the same time wretched. She closed her eyes. The river was lost under her lids. I sensed how everything—utterly everything—begins and ends.

The little attic took on the dimensions it had lost. Night had already transformed into day, and light into motion. Shadows gone, everything took on its earthly form: boxes, suitcases, a purse of crocodile skin, cases. A couple of spiders climbed the ledge of the window. Earwigs and bedbugs meandered along the edge of the wall. She didn’t notice them and I tried not to see them either. It was Wednesday. Lea looked through the window at the place where she would be in just a couple of hours.

"It’s never all there is," she said.

"It’s what I wanted."

"Was it so much for you?"

"We’re different people," I said. "It meant a lot to me."

For a moment it occurred to me what our children might look like. I sensed the presence of a third person.

"For as much as you come alive during it, it takes my life away."

"It wasn’t like that for me," I said. I still didn’t believe that something bad could happen to me, or worse than what had already happened. Something after which there was no one and nothing. That was an unreachable place for me, farther than where I was now, or where I ever wanted to get to. And at the same time it was here simply and honestly and lovingly, for the two of us.

"You and I," she said.

I thought about how, for her, life was an infectious cancer. There was death in every moment, in every wrinkle, in every movement of the eyelids, eyelashes, or eyebrows. Everything that took place rid her of control of the things that made her beautiful and what offered her control of something, at least.

Her eyes held that which had escaped her, how she was pretty in a different way from where she had been inside to the form of existence she carried on the outside. The time that she had cut short began running again.

"It’s the third time they’re moving us," she said. "They’re not going to let off the killed and wounded this time. That’ll be a pretty sight: everyone from the first to the last will be there."

"Terezin is a garish city," I said. "The fortress. I never lived in a place like this before with ramparts and a moat and all the things that go along with a place like that."

She smiled. "Maybe it’s just cheap. You can get a girl here for a rose or ten grams of sugar or a couple of grams of margarine. . .and a man? He comes free."

She was wearing yesterday’s porcelain smile. Her high eyebrows had fallen a little like tired or sad women’s do before she raised them again and her eyes brightened.

"You can leave me that rose you stole now. I changed my mind. I’ll deal with what it looks like somehow."

I didn’t have to think very hard to figure out what she was saying. I didn’t know if she was planning on turning me in—or just herself. And why she would do that? Would it be hard on her? Maybe for a little while. Who knew? Whatever had been important yesterday no longer was. It wasn’t only the unpleasantness that I didn’t like. I remembered that she had said she was married and why she had done so at the last moment—and what she had told me about before, how Vili Feld, her husband, was just as obsessed with her in the fortress with what he had been in Prague. What he was really like in life and what he probably wasn’t even if he thought himself to be—and what he most likely was instead. Aren’t we all selling something that shouldn’t be paid for? Who doesn’t act like their hearts are a piece of paper that they can tear apart, crumple up and throw away? The heart is cheap stuff too.

I couldn’t really say that I had seduced her. Only that we had been together, and how, and what it would mean to me from here on after whenever I would think of it, like everything that was important to me in my life, if maybe not all that decisive. What a permanent relationship between a woman and a man and a man and a woman is born of or at least the memory of one without thinking about how long it lasted or how quickly it had gone by. Who knew that was meaningful in someone’s life or what remained that way in some sense? "Seduce" wasn’t the right word for it; not even "sleeping together" was accurate. It was something that people want more of than they can get. And it’s what marks them for as long as they live just like the inexplicable does.

It was a beauty that evoked a longing for everything that happens only once; for everything that appears and disappears at the same time. Every pleasure caused her sorrow. It wasn’t in her power to reverse it. There was an anxiety in her eyes from all that she did; what had changed irrevocably for her and what she couldn’t (and she wasn’t the only one) make cold blooded sense of. The need or intensity she had suppressed in her screaming had not dwindled away. The thousand-sided face of tension and selfishness. A satisfaction that was never found or never relinquished. Why did it last only for a moment before it disappeared? What can only happen once and never again? And which isn’t all the more understandable or clear because of it?

She breathed in deeply and exhaled and spread her arms. She wore the expression of a person who was lost in herself. Her face had that look of sleep which comes before a deeper one. She didn’t have the strength she appeared to have even though I looked stronger that morning myself.

"I can’t stop thinking about how beautiful you are."

"Maybe you just see me that way."

"It’s the truth."

"I don’t want to get old."

I smiled. I knew every one of her movements. I didn’t want to remind her that my Grandma Olga would say: whoever didn’t want to grow old has to die when they’re young. I had a living example of it in front of my face.

"I’m sure you’ll find people in the east that will be nice to you." (I was thinking about Gotlieb Faber; about people who would be willing or able to buy at least a little part of her.)

"Do you really think that?"

"You don’t know who they are?" She knew what I was talking about.

All at once she said, "You are a friend of my heart."

I almost choked. A hot burst of blood went through my veins. I shut my eyes a couple of times.

My Grandma Olga used to say that I was born as a love child but no one had ever called me a ‘friend of the heart.’ We had come a long way since yesterday. I sensed what would be different inside me forever.

"You say nice things to me. The very nicest."

"You do the same."

Then she said, "I’ve already done anything and everything to survive."

"I’ve also done everything I could just to live. Don’t we all?" I kissed the inside of her palms. "It’s what you foretold in the cards."

Next door the old people began stirring. Had the time come? Both of us could imagine them. People holding their heads firmly if bowed against their will, with backs that nothing and nobody would ever straighten out again, weakened by their last night in the fortress and unprepared for many days’ journey by train where they would be squeezed by the hundreds into a space for forty. Men and women alike would take their aging bodies, their sunken chests, scrawny muscles, and knotty calves with them, their lined skin and wrinkles and bold heads. They would take their duck necks covered with age spots, their protruding bones and knuckles, along with all of their pain and scars. The motion of the train would be their only movement on a trip to destruction until they reached their final destination.

"I don’t want to live like a pig," she said.

"Nobody wants to," I answered.

"I know it’s not enough to only not want it," she added.

In the distance a whistle blew on the train tracks: two, three times. The wagons were already ready. I didn’t want to talk about the train or the tracks or the trip or what the east probably meant for us. How was it that one word could contain all the evil of all the ages from the past through the present to the distant future? It was a new gauge of fear, a new gauge of evil. Something that maybe hadn’t alarmed people, or, on the contrary, that had come like a shadow either in the same or a new shape. Who knew? I still didn’t know that it was that way, that a new standard of evil had arrived with the Germans, or that evil rarely mani-fests all of its dimensions or shapes all at once. Did the worst always come slowly or quickly? Could you see them or was it invisible?

"It’s a pleasure to look at you," I said.

"The train’s all assembled now," she said. "You should go get your things. Even the engine is there. Two of them. Fifty wagons. They’re sturdy. They don’t want us to get stranded along the way."

She was sizing up the situation like a blind person or like somebody who knows more than they let on by noises and sounds, probably like the old people were doing. She was bound to them from the opposite side, by her youth, her eighteen years, and by her fear of dying. I knew she was right. And I knew too what I would take from her for myself, like a person carries away a piece of another person; I hoped it was the same for her.

She dressed towards the light as if she were a tree or a river or a stone. Like a flower before it wilts. Even though she had already put on warm underwear for the winter in the east, I could still smell her body. Love was a word that at that moment would maybe sound ridiculous or empty, but it was more than a false hope right then or some scheme or the fulfillment of a dream; more than mere revenge or making good on an old debt that a friend had seduced a girl I loved. More than only childish, half-childish, manly, or half-manly rivalry. Maybe it was ore how a person always wants to carve a piece out a little higher and farther for himself than where other people are or where he is himself; to take a stand or not take one, at least in the eyes of everyone else or in your own; then he finds out, like Lea of Leuwarden, that every breath brings him one step lower and closer to where he came from, but to which he would never return again. Who knew what it was? A kind of justice that we hand out ourselves, at least among each other, if not just from within? The morning had already lost the truth of last night and the evening before. It was a part of the feelings that make a person either bigger or smaller. The way he faces the world, and then returns to himself and gets lost inside so deeply he gets to places he has never been before.

The gratitude I felt towards her was the kind that translates into pleasure, self-confidence, and promise for a man. A gratitude he takes with him on his way into the future. Every person has a different meaning for the word friendship. I could only guess afterwards what it meant to the other person. Was it something that love is born of even if that only happens later on in a corner of the memory or far off in the future because everything would already have been long past by then? No one remains how he used to be forever. Were those tears in her eyes? She cast me a look full of uncertainty. Was this the last freedom she would feel before she died? She looked like she was made of china.

"I wanted you to be strong. To know that you’re strong."

"You’re strong too," I lied. "Stronger than you think you are."

"I wanted to give you what only a woman can give a man. So you would know beforehand how strong you are. How you will always be stronger." And then she said, "The last thing we always have are our bodies. The last freedom, the last will, the last principle. The moments when my body is only mine like your body is only yours.

Was it a power that a woman gives a man or that a man takes from a woman? It lasts for as long and as far as life does, but at the same time it was what slowly eats life away. How it wanes. What was good and evil, permanent and fleeting, and what reassures a person and hurts too. Were we still the masters of our bodies?"

Next to Lea from Leuwarden that last moment on a Wednesday morning in September 1944, I thought about the secret art of accepting a person for what he was and wasn’t, or what he could be, things a person doesn’t ask or talk about because he doesn’t know who he is himself and if he does then he keeps it to himself. It was truth and illusion, a fantasy only a little better than a lie and at the same time the truth because there isn’t any other; everything that a person has and doesn’t have and what he can and can’t do and what he wants and doesn’t want. Why? Because. A thousand reasons. What does it mean to be honest? Is it worth it in every situation? When is it better to forget? We’d have to deal with that in a couple of hours on the trip, each one of us in a different wagon.

She had returned to the absentmindedness people have when they get ready to go on a long trip, or people who live somewhere for a long time and when the time finally comes to leave they don’t really know where they’re going. Like somebody who still has the feeling the door isn’t shut even after he’s checked it ten times. The trip awaiting her would take her from warmth to winter; to the east. Who knew how many times the train would get held up on the way? She was thinking of how warmly she would have to dress, what shoes she would take.

"I also wanted you to know how strong you are. And how you are better." I didn’t have to lie. "How it’ll help you if you look after yourself like you did here."

I felt the presence of many people in her, especially certain people, one of whom was her benefactor, Gotlieb Faber. I wasn’t trying to find out what she had paid for that help or what share Vili Feld had in all of it, or her father who had played his part, too. I selected to just put the name "many" on it.

She kissed me. I didn’t want her to explain anything. I felt her tongue. The warmth and moisture of her mouth. Her face. Her lips. I put my fingers into her hair. Then I handed her my handkerchief. I didn’t ask anything.

"Sometimes it’s the only thing that you can get from a man," she said. Her beauty was sadder that morning than it had been last night.

More had happened than I had wanted to. It was something different than I had wanted, something that I could learn to live with. Everything that I had taken she had let me take, and what I had been able to give her she gave back. But that’s how she was withering away like a person who is sick. Her eyes held the fear of a catastrophe bigger than herself, than the two of us, bigger than the world that she had lost an idea of and that increasingly filled her with a fear she found shameful. It had been that way for a long time. The early morning wind sounded like old people chattering, their words and screams. Like the echoes of old challenges and promises of new ones.

Next to Lea of Leuwarden, I remembered what Rabbi Cytron used to say at 24 Belgicka Street, about the light between the sun and the earth and about the twilight that wasn’t day or night. About the dark that disperses and in which everything disappears. About what a person is, what he has or hasn’t done and what even a dwindling echo gradually fades into before everything becomes an echo itself.

"It’s already day," she said. "And a cold one. It’ll be windy."

"Wear your warmest things. . . ."

She was already cringing.

"I feel naked no matter what I put on. It’s like being naked inside. Everything is outside of yourself. Nothing will ever warm you up again. Cold is everywhere. It doesn’t matter how thick a shawl you’ve got or how warm your boots or stockings are. It’s the worst. So much has already happened so many times to so many people. You have to be careful if you ask somebody for something more. It’s out of our hands. There always has to be two to try anything."

I kept silent.

"It’s good that it came on a Wednesday."

"You don’t have to make it bigger or less than what it is," I said. "It’s just a trip that we’re all going on."

I adjusted her feeling about numbers—that there had to be two or three of everything—in my mind. Or even four, if I counted Gotlieb Faber—and he probably wasn’t just a selfless idealist, even if he had killed himself so that he wouldn’t put anyone else in greater danger, except himself, than getting sent on a transport. (I could never figure out whether he took his life because of a guilty conscience, or out of weakness, or just the opposite, because he still had the strength to at least do something. Why then?)

"So many people vanish from us and we from them," she said.

Had she read my mind?

There were remnants of the last touches of night in her face. A bridge made of morning rays that she traipsed along from dusk to daybreak. Everything that was beyond words.

"Three is a lucky number, and it’s yours too," I said.

All of a sudden I sensed death or dying behind her small porcelain face that I couldn’t fight with mere words. It seemed like she was falling asleep or into a dream that she wouldn’t have the power to wake up from again. It was in the tone of her alto voice, in the vessel or cage of her body, in the shadows that scared her inside. In the premonition that she lacked an explanation for. She had more fear in her than faith, more uncertainty than self-confidence, more anxiety than levelheadedness that could drive the fear away. She was eighteen years old. I understood her words in a different way than she meant them. She was taking my words in her own way too.

In the morning light of the little attic in the old people’s home near the firehouse on L Street in Terezin, the Greater Fortress, at the end of September 1944, next to the beautiful and sad Lea from Leuwarden, recently married, without having spent her wedding night with her husband, with her long legs and face of porcelain, with her faultless skin stretching over every millimeter of her body, I thought how people would talk about what had gone on here some day and how it would all sound so far away and impossible, and how they would shake their heads in disbelief (at the selfishness or selflessness, the loyalty or infidelities, the betrayals and failures, at the truth and lies and self-delusion, at everything that has crippled people’s spirits and backs for so long already, at what people run to and in what they seek relief and why, at the people who protected themselves or killed themselves, along with their whole families, or who gave in and obediently filed onto the trains to the east without a fight, humiliated and confused, who didn’t even try to escape, not only because of the punishment those heroes got, but also because they didn’t have anyone or anywhere to run to, aware of what was waiting for them at the end of the tracks and the ramp; at the fear and secrets of people, the old and the young, at the free love, the women for sale, and at not belonging anywhere) and I would know that each person had been taken somewhere, each had gone some place and somebody knew who he had been, and that they had been the children of known and unknown fathers, of known and unknown mothers. One of them had a daughter in Leuwarden who colored my last night in the fortress of Terezin with the shade of things never to be repeated, of everything that can happen only once. She leaned toward me again before I started getting dressed and kissed me.

I watched her as she put on her traveling outfit. She had young, firm, eighteen-year-old breasts. In the morning light I could see light blue veins rambling over her left breast like little paths of a map or a river, through which fear, shame, sadness, and blood flowed. Her skin was almost translucent. Her heart was pumping under the strongest vein. I noticed how her nipples leaned off to the sides of the shallow hollow between her breasts which called to mind large cone-shaped drops that descended into the smooth, soft skin of her throat.

"It’s good luck to set out on a trip on Wednesday," I said.

"I heard about it Sunday."

"They say that if you leave on Wednesday it’ll be a long and easy trip."

"Of course," she said.

"Are you going to take your cards with you?"

"I don’t take a step without them," she smiled.

"They could take you into an office somewhere, like the bosses here pick the prettiest and most capable."

And I told her again that the Nazis got confused when they saw somebody with golden hair and blue eyes like hers (at the very least, they gave those people preference). It was an advantage in some way. Even if all their talk about the Nordic races was probably wearing off by now, since they themselves were a far cry from it. Just look at Hitler or Himmler, or at Goering or Goebbels, and Rosenberg. I was desperate to try and find a little honor at least in something. Maybe I even believed it a little. The poison of the greatest lie which had been repeated a thousand times had most likely infected everything including its victims and the subject of the lie itself. It was a lie of the ugly.

"I have no doubt they’ll want to surround themselves with people like me," she said and the uncertainty in her voice didn’t even sound like she was throwing it back in my face. "If their plan is to get rid of people with black and brown hair by mating them with pure blondes, I’ve got something to look forward to. No one has ever been able to regulate everything from the first to the last as they have. What you do, what you don’t do, how and when you breathe, what you eat or love. From the cradle to the grave. All our pleasures, interests, and feelings. Desires and who is allowed to do what. They dictate how everything is supposed to be until there is a long list of all the things you can’t do anymore."

She smiled her porcelain smile and glanced at her suitcases. She knew how unforgiving the Nazis were just like everybody did. And she knew that if we all didn’t come out to stand in line at the same time, each person would get it in the end. Jedem das seine. It was and always would be a question of time, not of what color hair or skin or how beautiful or how ugly a person was, not even a question of luck or misfortune.

"So you see that a woman will cross the written and unwritten laws for a man—or against him—any place and any time."

"Am I supposed to ask why?"

"Not me," she replied, as if she were saying that why didn’t exist for her anymore. Again, I somehow felt the presence of somebody or something else, a third thing. It wasn’t only her partner, my friend and enemy, or a child that Lea and I could have together. It was the omnipresent presence of something or somebody that isn’t born, whenever two people, a man and a woman, get close; what is born, dies, or survives from them. What marks them for a long time, invisibly and visibly.

Something in her had fled. I wanted to stop it or change it or at least lessen its effect but the light had already moved outside of her. She returned to her kingdom of shadows where she could be alone. Where there was only a single lie and a single death, connected with the only name of that one person. No one could go there to help her. Was she thinking about the people who had thrown away the possibility not to shoot, or about the people who still had a cyanide pill up their sleeve just to make sure, like Gotlieb Faber had had? Was the help of my pleasure and energy to no avail? I thought about how a woman always risks something more than a man, even if in everything else they are the same.

She had begun to distance herself from me without moving an inch, like a part of the universe, a star that first falls and then disappears; something that separates a person from the rest without taking a step. How all the people are strangers to one another and that doesn’t change even for the very closest. Maybe she was thinking about what would happen if everyone, all men and women including the old people and children, had guns to shoot back with. Or was she thinking about something else? I don’t know where her mind could have wandered.

"It would be a thousand to one," I said.

"Maybe ten thousand to one. You know what kind of odds the Germans have."

"You can’t change some people," she said. (She really was thinking about something else.) "We all got born somehow. What can you do if it’s your nature?"

"It would probably be hard for you to change that, and all a person is who doesn’t shoot is a coward," I told her. "Maybe one person can stick up for himself when his back is to the wall but few do it in advance. Their nature has got to have something to do with it. Or a different kind of hope. How and for what you were raised and what things you experienced. The next place will be different for sure."

"Some things you can only answer for yourself," she said.

Maybe she was thinking about her friend in the British Air Force, or about how many more airplanes and pilots Germany had and how they hadn’t brought England to her knees yet. Maybe she was thinking about the young men her age who were fighting against the Third Reich but had already fallen while she, in the meanwhile, lived on, or about the soldiers who had already been taken out of the war due to becoming wounded, crippled, blinded, or deaf. There was no end to her imagination, just like there was no end to mine.

"What are you thinking about?" I asked.

"An eclipse," she said with a smile. "I’ve always been able to find the beautiful in everything so far. Maybe there’s even something beautiful in natural disasters, if you live through them. Earthquakes, floods, fire. But there’s not one second of beauty in what’s happening here, now, to us." Could she tell why I didn’t want to talk about it?

Down on the street people were pulling the first funeral wagons laden with bread and coffee substitute. They were handing out triple portions to the people who were going on the transport as always as well as to those who hadn’t been added to it until last night, either because somebody was missing or they had been exchanged for somebody else. Many people would down their portions all at once and in a little while, we, too, would belong in their company along with my friend, Adler. My stomach was growling. A dozen men around the age of forty, happy that they weren’t going on the transport, were strapped into hardness around their shoulders, chest, and hips; they pulled the full wagons. Among them was the Head Rabbi of Berlin, Leon Bacck, dressed in his wrinkled Sunday suit with a tie and holey shoes, who had refused to become a member of the Council of Elders and had signed up for garbage detail or the hardest work instead. Without being conscious of it, I looked for him among the men pulling the wagon.

"They would be the happiest if we all killed ourselves by our own hands, like Gotlieb Faber," she said. "That’s the last choice that they leave you: to decide your own just desserts. They humiliate you with your most secret and private longings. They show you that one way: the east. Whatever else they don’t make a point of allowing is forbidden."

"There’s fog," I said. There was nothing more to explain. Everything had been revealed to the bone. I saw mist in her eyes.

"Yes, there’s fog out there. Helpless people, a helpless God. I always suspected that our God wasn’t as omnipotent as we’d like him to be and how I’d like him to be. It’s all just one big murder—and nobody is stopping it from happening. Maybe not because they didn’t want to. People are as helpless as their God. Maybe that’s the only thing I know for sure. It’s sitting in front of my face like an open window. I can see it well. There’s fog everywhere—you’re right. Everything is shrouded over. There’s only fog, fog, and more fog."

That was the last thing that she said. The word "fog" repeated three times encompassed her eighteen-year-old life; her gravity, beauty, and passion; how she had been happy—if only for a little while—and how she was immutably sad; it was a thousand kinds of darkness, shadows, of all the seasons, every day and night; what she had borne and thought about, when and how a person was free and what it meant; how a path turns and trails off or disappears, where it’s headed; how everything did or didn’t make sense; her open window that she only saw fog through; the words that a person resorts to and is afraid of; and how a woman or a girl fights with fate like the best man does. How she can be happy or strong in a moment, like a tree that grows, a blossoming flower or a river before it pours into the sea. And where the end—of everything—begins.

And in the end, the fog rolls in again. What become of women many times, either with their consent or against their will, or the combination of the two, in a day, a night or a minute, even though the rest of their lives are branded by doing so, and why most likely the first thing women insist on of all is the right to do what they want with their bodies, regardless of the circumstances or how they fight with it. How they demand, rightly, that it is their body. How each person in the world controls his own life—at least in some small way—or a piece of his life, his fate, or a fraction of it, and how that something isn’t possible to direct without repercussions. It was something that people try to understand about each other and only manage to rarely, if ever. It’s what changes people and the world for the better, or the worse; what changes them for the better or worse by what they will do or what they dare to do.

Farewell had spread through her without saying goodbye. She had lapsed into an invisible darkness. A silence more quiet than quiet. I was only one of the many men in her short life. On the other hand, what had happened between us hadn’t been an ordinary or everyday kind of thing. I sense how it was that she was beautiful, in spite of everything, by what she still believed in at this last moment and by what she didn’t.

That was all there was to our parting. What she had said came back to me: that a person will do anything when there’s nobody watching. And what Vili Feld had said and Lea had repeated: that nobody knows who his master is and what that meant or didn’t mean. And what disappears in us before we disappear ourselves. And how we ourselves drop out of everybody else’s lives. She was already standing in the full light of the window. She turned the key in the lock and put a red ace of hearts in my hand. I thanked her. The morning light streamed over her. The rays of the early sun danced in her hair and over her skin. She looked like she was going to dissolve in a moment with her white complexion in the white skirt with buttons down the front.

The sky was already clear to the north, just like it was to the east. The wind was blowing the few smudges of clouds that were left from last night on to the west.

There was an eagerness in her eyes like there had been in the beginning that I didn’t know how to interpret. Her breasts were trembling—and the look in the her eyes said that everything was futile.

I left her by way of the back entrance, along the locked troughs with the rain water people washed in sometimes, and which Lea of Leuwarden never came or went through because, according to her, it brought bad luck. I could get to the broken-down walls between blocks up to the number 1,218 by way of the courtyard and shortcuts. Adler would already be waiting for me. I avoided the streets that were watched. Before I went around the troughs and the latrine I heard somebody turning a big house key in the lock, and the gate closing before it slammed shut.

The old people in the hall were asking Vili what was going to happen. I could tell it was him by his voice. Had all the rain cars come? Were they only cattle cars or personal ones too? No? Yes? They always dispatched the trains on time. All that was left from yesterday’s rain was dampness and mud. The fog was dispersing quickly. The sky was clear blue and the sun was giving off rays of gold; the wind had brought to mind everything that lasted forever and at the same time was fleeting. The mountains in the distance, the narrow rocks, trees and fields, the stones. The small islands of poplars standing in their rows. It was a land older than its people, impassive and independent of their desires, and otherwise more beautiful than they were. The straight streets of the fortress were in front of me. Day had come.

I happened to find out what Vili had been doing that night in the Central evidence building. He hadn’t made it to the main room. The Council clerks who answered to the Commandant for the transport had made sure that the boxes with the registration cards were kept under surveillance. The leaders already knew that only the people who were allowed to live had a chance in the east—a chance of ninety-one days and odds for survival at one to twnety-nine. In order not to spread fear, despair, and panic they kept it to themselves. They couldn’t do anything for the victims anyway, even if they knew who was going. It was only a question of time before they themselves would be in line and the leaders would become the same victims with the same chances for survival. Death was the big equalizer. The time that one person would prolong to the detriment of another person was what wasn’t fair; friends and strangers, men and their wives, old parents. That’s why there were so many prostitutes, because nobody wanted to commit themselves to anything. It was a lost night for Vili. Nobody had been allowed on the streets until six in the morning. He had slept in his clothes, with his shoes off on a bench in the hall for people when they waited for their papers to be sorted out on the third floor of the Magdeburg barracks. He already knew that nobody would be sent in place of himself or Lea from Leuwarden. Rabbi M. had locked himself in a flat for the prominents with his Hungarian wife so that nobody could come looking for him and want something. He had too many friends among the men and the women being sent on the transport. And Commandant Rahm had insisted that the wheel of fate turned fairly—at least in his Nazi terminology—so that nobody would be left out from those already called up for the transport. That certainly didn’t have anything to do with fairness. In addition, he had a special fondness for exact numbers and demanded responsibility from all the members of the Council of Elders from the first to the last. Just like the people in Berlin kept an eye on him and the Jewish representative in the fortress. Rabbi M. didn’t intend to risk his battered safety for even the more fragile safety of someone else. The clash of interests in two attempts for safety ended up being dangerous. He didn’t care what the office workers thought of him. What mattered to him were the people at the SS headquarters. His life depended on them. The workers in the office could only complicate things.

Adler didn’t ask me about anything. He didn’t want to go on the transport by himself. He was happy that I had come in time, if pale after not having slept, with circles under my eyes. My whole body was hurting. I didn’t even sit down. We picked up our things bound in the brown margarine boxes and hung our transport numbers around our necks. I had number 63.

"Yeah," Adler said a little later, as if he were answering me or throwing something back in my face. "You never did get hung up on little things."

"No," I said.

"We’d better go if we don’t want to miss it," Adler said. Nothing more. Then we went up to the train station which cut across the center of the fortress along L Street, the longest avenue in the fortress that cut like a knife deep into its belly and ended in a pair of silver tracks.

"You still want to make everybody happy?" Adler asked.

I had stopped talking to him. He hadn’t even asked me if I wanted help with my box.

"How are you feeling?" he asked finally.

"I’m fine," I answered. "How about you?"

"Good. How could I not be?"

We got in the same wagon with Vili Feld. Nobody felt like talking. Everything that had ever happened was already over. The first thought on everybody’s minds was where we were going and what was going to happen. Everybody was asking themselves their most secret question: am I going to make it like I survived the fortress or in some other camp before Terezin? Am I ready to live at the suffering of somebody else, instead of someone else, or at somebody else’s expense? Am I willing to swallow my own heart so that my legs don’t shake and fall under me the moment my own fate is decided? What will happen, will happen. What awaits us awaits everybody.

On top of everything, everybody was exhausted. The wheels of the rain periodically banged up against the connector along the track. Sometimes the tracks would shift slightly and the train would jump like we were traveling through empty air or across a deep pit. Being quiet and resting simply meant gathering strength for what was to come. The direction to the east could only augur bad. It was either luck or bad fortune that nobody knew anything for sure. Even with the changes in tracks and pauses, the train kept heading in the same direction. The track was a funnel that the whole world, the time and the meaning of everything gushed out of. Endless ties of rail. The world disappeared behind us with every turn of the wheels.

Men and women traveled separately. Two thousand five hundred men, two thousand five hundred women. Fifty wagons, two engines, one in the front and the other at the end. The women that had been convicted of something while they were at the fortress, from petty offenses to theft or disturbing the peace through fights or arguments with other occupants, or among themselves, Bible-toters and such, all rode in the first three wagons. They crammed a hundred of us into a freight wagon for forty men or eight horses. We got a place above on the top of the suitcases under the roof of the cattle car. A little light and air made their way through and one night when it rained a few drops of rain came in by the little wire window. People in the middle and down on the bottom of the car almost went mad from being crushed. They didn’t have any light or air, they only hampered on another. Everybody handled it the first day and night. By the second day and night, they loathed one another. They beat a man who had dared to say that Adolf Hitler had an unknown grandfather whom his grandmother from his father’s side, Maria Anna Schickelgruber, never talked about and who was thought to be either Johann Nepomuk Hiedler or his brother, Johann Georg Hiedler or a Jewish businessman from Graz by the name of Frankenberger or Frankreither.

We longed for each other’s deaths. We traveled three days and four nights. We didn’t have any place to go to the toilet. It was the worst for the people under us. I thought about the marathon runners that Adler claimed later on pissed in their pants so they wouldn’t lose time. Ours was a ridiculous race or trip where the participants got to the end and then died. The last place we stopped was in Krakow for a whole night. Other trains came in and went out on the track next to ours; the wheels would screech and the whistles would blow. The local announcer would call out departures to Berlin, Warsaw, and Sophia, to the icy seaside in the North and Danzig. It sounded like a song. Her voice was full and rich. It carried like a dream throughout the train station, sensuous, beautiful like the fleetingness of the stars and at the same time it was hard like the earth, the changing of the seasons of the year, the nights and days. Then the announcer called out the stop of the train to Hamburg-Altona with layovers in Dresden, Leipzig, or Oberhausen, Bremen, Frankfurt, and Wuppertal. The secret of a young womanly voice flavored the words. It spoke of a world that other people had been born to, the right ones, from the right mothers and the right fathers. It carried a different spontaneity, a different freedom, anticipation, and expectation.

When we reached our final destination of Auschwitz-Birkenau they didn’t even sort through the people in the first three wagons where the convicted women were, where Lea from Leuwarden was. From the first to the last, the women went from the ramp down the alley between the Waffen SS with their dogs on leashes—pregnant, sick, guilty, or innocent—and straight to the furnaces. Most of them didn’t have a clue where they were going or could only have guessed. Some of them stumbled on the tracks. In twenty minutes they would be poisoned and suffocated on Cyclon B and shoveled into the ovens. Nobody buried the dead. By nightfall, ash was all that remained of any of them.