GEORGE KONRAD
539
I stand in the lobby of the ghetto hospital holding a submachine
gun ; a corpse wrapped in a gray robe is wheeled past me. I look
down in the yard; a pile of scantily dressed dead bodies with clam–
bering hands and feet reaches up to the first floor. The door opens
and I embrace a white shadow. I race down the corridor, and angry
men jump out from behind brown doors. They stand in my way, and
an hour later put their hands under my arms and help me through
one of the doors-my legs dangle like a rag doll's. The prison barber
steps out into the corridor in his white smock and looks in disbelief at
the bloody razor in his hand. Inside, in the swivel chair, my prison
buddy hangs his head sideways. The barber was to be released today
after a fifteen-year stretch; he was going to give me a good-bye
shave. I walk down the corridor in pajamas and a bathrobe , carrying
a stick in my hand, and smile at the poker-faced nurse. In a corner a
former comrade is on all fours, whimpering. He pulls on my shoe–
lace, is too scared to straighten up-someone might shout through
the window. He asks for my cigarette, rubs his side against the ribs
of the radiator, then crawls toward the nurses' station and waits for
hours for a sugar cube.
You are a mouse that's been flung on the ground and covered
with a flowerpot. You must hurry: mezzanine, second floor, you'll
never reach the third. From behind the curtain, a sharpshooter is
watching you through a telescope-you, too, are focusing on strange
eyeballs. You elude the blockade, knowing only too well whom they
are trying to surround. You follow strange footsteps, there is no
going back-if you could at least tell someone that you will never
ever find your home. But there is no letup, no rest; just as you can't
escape the tyranny of a kidney-stone attack, you cannot ignore the
string of blunders you have committed-they cannot be undone.
There is no forgiveness and no punishment in store for you.
This
intruder you cannot work out of your system. A strange dog teamed
up with you, and now he wants you for his food. He is whining down
where your ankle flashes, and there is no way of shutting yourself
in-he works his way through all doors. Will anyone ever take you
in? How can they, with this constant companion of yours? They stole
your face from the mirror; it's your interrogator you see smiling
back at you. You touch a chair and it crumbles to dust under your
finger. You cannot even bring yourself to say anything, though your
