He remembered a young man who, rushing up to a German gendarme, howled that he was not a Jew — but howled it in Yiddish, probably because he knew no German. Rappaport felt the insane comedy of the situation, and suddenly the most precious thing to him was to preserve to the end the integrity of his mind, which would enable him to maintain an intellectual distance from the scene around him. However, he had to find — he explained this to me objectively and slowly, as to a man from “the other side” who could not be expected to understand anything of such experiences — some value external to himself, a prop of some sort for his mind. Since that was altogether impossible, he decided to believe in reincarnation. Maintaining the belief for fifteen or twenty minutes would be sufficient. Yet he could not accomplish that, not even in an abstract way, so he picked out from among a group of officers situated some distance from the place of execution one who, by his appearance, stood apart.
He described him to me, as though from a photograph. This was a young deity of war: tall, handsome, in battle dress, of which the silver borders seemed to have turned slightly ash-gray from the heat; he had on his full outfit, the iron cross under the collar, field glasses in a case on his chest, a deep helmet, a revolver with the holster conveniently moved toward the buckle of the belt, and in his gloved hand a handkerchief, clean and neatly folded, which he pressed to his nose now and then, because the executions had lasted so long — since that morning — that the flames had reached some of those cut down earlier in the corner of the yard, and from that place now belched the stench of burning flesh. But — and this, too, Rappaport did not forget — he grew aware of the presence of the sweetish corpse-smoke only when he observed the handkerchief in the hand of the officer he had singled out. He told himself that the moment he was shot, he would become that German.
He knew perfectly well that the idea was complete nonsense, even from the point of view of any metaphysical doctrine, reincarnation included, because the “place in the body” was already occupied. But somehow this did not bother him; in fact, the longer and more greedily he stared at the chosen man, the better he was able to cling to this thought that was to sustain him until the final moment. Already it was as if he were being given support — by the man. The man would help him.
This, too, Rappaport said calmly, but in his voice there was, I thought, a catch of admiration for the “young deity” who directed the entire operation so expertly, without moving from his place, without shouting or falling into the half-drunk trance of striking and kicking in which his subordinates worked, iron-chested. In that moment Rappaport understood even this: the subordinates had to behave that way; they were hiding from the victims in the hatred of them, but the hatred could not be produced in themselves except through acts of brutality. They had to batter the Jews with their rifle butts; blood had to flow from lacerated heads and crust upon faces, because it made the faces hideous, inhuman, and in this way — I am quoting Rappaport — there did not appear, in what was done, a gap through which horror might peer, or compassion.
But the young deity in the silver-braided uniform required neither these nor any other contrivances to act perfectly. He stood in a slightly elevated place, the white handkerchief applied to his nose with a movement that had something in it of the refined duelist. He was the master of the house and the commander, in one person. In the air floated flakes of ash, driven by the heat that pulsed from the fire; behind the thick walls, through the grated windows without panes, flames roared, but not a single ash fell on the officer or on his white handkerchief.
In the presence of such perfection, Rappaport managed to forget about himself, when suddenly the gate opened and in drove a film crew. Various orders were giren in German, and the gunshots immediately ceased. Rappaport did not know then — or later, when he told me this — what had happened. Perhaps the Germans intended to film a pile of corpses, to use the footage in a newsreel depicting the enemy’s actions (this took place near the Eastern Front). The slain Jews would be shown as the victims of the Bolsheviks. That may have been the case; Rappaport, however, offered no interpretation; he only related what he saw.
Immediately afterward came his failure. Those still alive were put in a row and filmed, whereupon the officer with the handkerchief asked for one volunteer. Rappaport understood at once that he should step forward. He did not know exactly why he should, but felt that if he did not, it would be terrible for him. The moment arrived in which the whole force of his will was exerted to make that one step — but he did not budge. The officer then gave them fifteen seconds to think and, turning his back on them, spoke quietly, casually, to some younger soldier.
Rappaport, as a doctor of philosophy, having earned his university degree with a brilliant dissertation on logic, hardly needed the entire apparatus of syllogisms to realize that if no one stepped forward, all would die: hence whoever now came forth from the line really would be risking nothing. It was simple, clear, and certain. He renewed his effort — this time, true, without conviction — and again did not budge. A few seconds before the time was up, someone presented himself, however, and disappeared with two soldiers behind a broken wall. Several revolver shots rang out. The young volunteer, smeared with blood, his own or not his own, then returned to the group.
It was dusk when the large gate was set ajar and, staggering in the cold evening air, the group of those left alive ran out into the empty street.
They dared not flee at first, but no one showed any interest in them. Why, Rappaport could not say. He did not attempt to analyze what the Germans did; they were like fate, which one did not have to explain.
The volunteer — need it be said? — had moved the bodies of the executed, and those still alive were finished off with the revolver. As if to see whether he was right that I really had not understood a thing about his story, Rappaport then asked me why the officer requested a volunteer and had been prepared, in the absence of one, to kill the lot of them, though that would have been “unnecessary” — on that particular day, at any rate — and why, moreover, he did not even consider announcing that nothing would happen to the volunteer. I did not, I confess, pass this test: I replied that perhaps the German had acted thus from contempt, scorning to enter into conversation with the victims. Rappaport shook his birdlike head.
“I understood it later,” he said, “thanks to other things. Although he spoke to us, you see, we were not people. He knew that we comprehended human speech but that nevertheless we were not human; he knew this quite well. Therefore, even if he had wanted to explain things to us, he could not have. The man could do with us what he liked, but he could not enter into negotiations, because for negotiation you must have a party in at least some respect equal to the party who initiates it, and in that yard there were only he and his men. A logical contradiction, yes, but he acted exactly according to that contradiction, and scrupulously. The simpler ones among his men did not possess this higher knowledge; the appearance of humanity given by our bodies, our two legs, faces, hands, eyes, that appearance deterred them a little from their duty; thus they had to butcher those bodies, to make them unlike people’s. But for him such primitive proceedings were no longer necessary. This sort of explanation is usually received metaphorically, as a kind of fable, but it is completely literal.”
About this fragment of his past we never spoke again, nor did we touch on any others. But some time had to pass before I could stop remembering, whenever I saw Rappaport, the scene he had drawn so vividly for me, of the prison yard with bomb craters, the people with faces veined in red and black from blows to the head, and the officer whose body he wanted — fraudulently — to move into. I cannot say to what extent there remained in him a mindfulness of the annihilation he escaped. Rappaport was, in any case, a very sensible man — yet at the same time quite comical. I will incur his displeasure the most when I tell the way he left his room each day (though I did not mean to spy). In the hotel corridor, by the elevator, there was a large mirror. Rappaport, who had a bad stomach and stuffed his pockets with bottles of multicolored pills, when he left each morning always stuck out his tongue in front of the mirror, to see if it was coated. He did this so regularly that I would have thought it extraordinary had he omitted the practice.