By train to Bologna (where I bought my hiking boots), by truck to Rovereto; thenceforward we moved in daily spurts of twenty or twenty-five miles, always accompanied or monitored, from village to village, farm to farm, on foot, by cart, in preposterous automobiles. And the land shown me by my guides, my deliverers, how painterly it was, the buildings of earthen crockery, the stone variegated like pork brawn in the mild breath of dusk. How thickly grassed and trimly forested: here, and now, the earth has good hair, thick and trim, and a good scalp beneath, not like there, not like before, all patched and pocked. The land is innocent. It never did anything.
March and February we spent on the Brenner, where we lodged at three different farmsteads. While hardly ideal, our living arrangements were suitably ascetic, and conducive to inner preparation. Personally I longed for human society and for exercise (a good long tramp, for example), but no doubt Odilo had his reasons. Had his reasons for those weeks spent in hayloft and cowshed under a mound of blankets with nothing to do but pray and shiver. We heard the distinct whispers of dawn and dusk, and the dogs barking, but no further rumor of war. It was snowing on the day we resumed our northward journey. Snowing patiently, for there was much of it on the ground, many snowflakes to be restored like white souls to the heavens. By jeep and truck we moved swiftly up through the towns and cities of middle Europe. Much of it was junk and trash, awaiting collection by war. Buildings were black, awaiting the color of fire. People were smudged, trampled, awaiting the hooves and treads of armies. Europe churned in the night like the seas of human forms round the stoves of station waiting rooms. Everywhere I went, their expressions charged with power and delight, men gave me gold.
I knew all this gold was sacred and indispensable to our mission. Accordingly, at the final staging post, the final farm, within view of the River Vistula, where we lived well and warmly, and there were the heads of children to pat and tousle, and the striped mattress before the fire—we buried our gold. Swearing most eloquently and solemnly, we buried the pouched filings under a compost heap behind the barn. Of course, the act was merely symbolic: the gold’s temporary return to the earth. Because we dug it up again five days later, after the compost heap had gone. When he swears, Odilo invokes human ordure, from which, as we now know, all human good eventually emanates.
How many times have I asked myself: when is the world going to start making sense? Yet the answer is out there. It is rushing toward me over the uneven ground.
5
Here there is no why
The world is going to start making sense…
… Now.
I, Odilo Unverdorben, arrived in Auschwitz Central somewhat precipitately and by motorbike, with a wide twirl or frill of slush and mud, shortly after the Bolsheviks had entrained their ignoble withdrawal. Now. Was there a secret passenger on the backseat of the bike, or in some imaginary sidecar? No. I was one. I was also in full uniform. Beyond the southern boundary of the Lager, in a roofless barn, I had slipped out of our coarse traveling clothes and emotionally donned the black boots, the white coat, the fleece-lined jacket, the peaked cap, the pistol. The motorbike I found earlier, wedged into a ditch. Oh how I soared out of there, with what vaulting eagerness, what daring. . . . Now I straddled this heavy machine and revved with jerked gauntlet. Auschwitz lay around me, miles and miles of it, like a somersaulted Vatican. Human life was all ripped and torn. But I was one now, fused for a preternatural purpose.
Your shoulder blades still jolted to the artillery of the Russians as they scurried eastward. What had they done here? Done something as an animal does: just finds it’s gone ahead and done it. I reacted on impulse. To tell the truth, I was in less than perfect control of myself. I started shouting (they sounded like shouts of pain and rage). And at whom? At these coat hangers and violin bows, at these aitches and queries and crawling double-U’s, ranked like tabloid expletives? I marched; I marched, shouting, over the bridge and across all the railway tracks and into the birch wood—into the place I would come to know as Birkenau. After a short and furious rest in the potato store I entered the women’s hospital, inflexibly determined on an inspection. It was not appropriate. I see that now (it was a swoon of where-to-begin?). My arrival only deepened the stupefaction of the few orderlies, never mind the patients, sprawled two or three to a straw sack and still well short of the size of a woman. And rats as big as cats! I was astonished by the power wi h