MICHAL GOVRIN
571
the constant oppression. Something so familiar, so close in temperament, in
gestures. Such belonging. Belonging?
An old car. The shaved nape of the driver's neck stuck in a cap. Poplar
trees, autumn fields. I am in the back seat, huddled in my coat. On the way
to Auschwitz.
And perhaps you should be silent about that trip. Not talk about the
yellow flowers, the gravel in the sun, the chatter of the Polish cleaning
women who laughingly point out to me that my trousers are unstitched.
My trousers? On what side of the barricade?
How to write you about the heavy marching in an attempt to grasp
something through the remnants of constructions-as from archaeological
digs of thirty, not two thousand years ago. To understand the chasm sepa–
rating sanity and madness with barbed-wire fences. The house beyond the
fence, half a mile away, was always there, with the same smoke in the chim–
ney and the same geranium pots behind the curtains. And here?
How to write about the dark steps with a group of Polish high school
students on them. The wall of liquidations between two blocs. A barred
window. A few fallen leaves scattered on the sill. Expressionless walls in the
gas chambers, the iron doors of the ovens. Polish sky. Between the cham–
bers, in the corridors, photographs and numbers. Printed columns of
names. And the silence of another morning, now. As when I held my
breath, a girl of six or seven, in the schoolyard for a whole minute, through
the whole siren, so that I'd be dizzy when I intoned the words,
six million.
How to write you about the forced march through the tremendous
extents of Birkenau Camp. About the dampness still standing in the aban–
doned blocs, between those three-tiered wooden bunks, and the straw sacks
on the dirt floor. How to imagine Mother within that silent madness.
Mother. A shaved head in nights of hall ucinations, nights among packed
bodies. How to put Mother into one of the gigantic photos placed along
the railroad track. How to force myself to imagine her in this emptiness?
Polish earth. Small autumn flowers. The driver waits. Dozes in the sun
in the car.
And maybe all the questions are not right. For it's impossible to under–
stand. Not even at the end of the journey to this stage set. Impossible to
understand wi thout the fear of death that catches the breath, wi thout the
palpable threat on the flesh. Impossible to grasp death from all the hun–
dreds of photos. Maybe only the heaps of empty shoes are still hovering
between life and death. There I finally recited the
Kaddish . Kaddish
over
heaps of shoes.
And maybe all the questions start only after the shoes also crumble.
Beyond the crazy stage set of death, which will always remain incompre–
hensible. And maybe all the questions begin only with the silent
