will it happen, the conversion of the Jews? Tomorrow morning. The rumor and gossip, which often tend to overexcite the male patients, we leniently designate as latrine talk.
Hier ist kein warum. . . . Disappointingly, my German fails to improve. I speak it, and appear to understand it, and give and take orders in it, but on some level it just isn’t sinking in. My German is no more advanced than my Portuguese. I think it took a lot out of me learning colloquial English. That was my shot. It’s a funny language, German. For one thing, everybody shouts it. All those very long words: the literalism, the tinkertoy accumulation. It sounds pushy, beginning every sentence with a verb like that. And take the first person singular: ich. “Ich.” Not a masterpiece of reassurance, is it? I sounds nobly erect. Je has a certain strength and intimacy. Eo’s okay. Yo I can really relate to. Yo! But ich? It’s like the sound a child makes when it confronts its own . . . Perhaps that’s part of the point. No doubt all will come clear as soon as my German gets better. When will that be? I know. Tomorrow morning!
In the officers’ bordello, which is situated, appropriately, at the far corner of the Experimental Block (its windows permanently shuttered or boarded), I have changed the amatory habits of a lifetime. Much of the old thoroughness has gone. Much of the attention to detail that was wont to mark my dealings with the gentler sex. It may be an awareness of my married status (of which my colleagues often jokingly remind me), or a way of squaring all my activities with the ethos of the KZ, or a simple boredom with the female face, but now my thrusts of love—so sudden, so hurried, so helpless, so hopeless—are exclusively directed at the source of universal sustenance and fruition. The bald whores give us no money. We ask no questions. Because here there is no why.
Another Kat-Zet usage, widely current, used in many forms: it sounds like smistig, but it would appear to be a conflation of two German substantives, Schmutzstück and Scbmuckstück, “garbage” and “jewel.” Ironically, again, smistig means “come to an end,” “concluded,” “finished.”
I have started corresponding with my wife, whose name is Herta. Herta’s letters come, not from the fire (das Feuer), but from the trash (der Plunder). And they are in German. My letters to Herta are brought to me by the valet. I laboriously erase them, here, at night, in the silent room. I am left with nice sheets of white paper. But what for? My letters are in German too, though they contain gobbets of English that are playfully pedagogic in tone. I think it makes sense that Herta and I should get to know each other in this way. We’re pen pals.
It seems that my wife has already conceived her doubts about the work we are doing here. Obviously the misunderstanding will have to be cleared up. There is also the matter of the baby (das Baby). “My darling, my one, my all, there will be other babies,” I write, somewhat confusingly. “There will be lots of little babies.” I don’t much like the sound of this. Is the baby—is das Baby the bomb baby? The baby that has such power over its parents? I don’t think so. Our baby (which has a name: Eva) exerts colossal power as a subject. But not the physical power that the bomb baby exerted, over its parents and over everybody else in the black room: some thirty souls.
The photograph of her I found in Rome, in the gardens of the monastery—I take it out and look at it. At night my eyes are full of tears. By day I throw myself into my work. I wonder if there will be any end to the sacrifices I am being asked to make.
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“Uncle Pepi” was everywhere. This being the thing that was most often said about him. For instance, “It’s as if he’s everywhere,” or “The man seems to be everywhere,” or, more simply, ” ‘Uncle Pepi’ is everywhere.” Omnipresence was only one of several attributes that tipped him over into the realm of the superhuman. He was also fantastically clean, for Auschwitz; when he was present, and he was present everywhere, I could sense the various cuts and nicks on my queasy jawline, my short but disobedient hair, the unhappy hang of my uniform, my lusterless black boots. His face was feline in shape, wide at the temples, and his blink was as slow as any cat’s. On the ramp he cut a frankly glamorous figure, where he moved like a series of elegant decisions. You felt that he was only playing the part of a human being. Self-isolated as he was, “Uncle Pepi” nonetheless displayed the best kind of condescension, and was in fact unusually collegial—not so much with youngsters like myself, of course, but with more senior medical figures, like Thilo and Wirths. I was moreover privileged—and on something like a regular basis—to assist “Uncle Pepi” in Room 1 on Block 20 and later in Block 10 itself.