ARNOST LUSTIG
313
"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 some–
body 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 stop–
ping 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
