In the what? I want to take her hand and say, Mother. You are on a globe that looks like a crystal ball or a marble in a light bed of cotton wool. Birds fly around it. Mother, you are on the planet earth.
PART 3
8
Because ducks are fat
Ever since my days at Schloss
Hartheim I had thoughtofmaking a
sentimental journey, to Auschwitz.
The place of power on the confluence of the rivers; the place where the numbered Jews, and all the others, who had no number, came down from the heavens; the place where, for a time, there was no why. And it happened. In 1929. I had done a fair bit of traveling by then, during my military service and my labor service and my Strength Through Joy holidays and all the rest of it, and I thought I’d missed my chance. But it happened. I was thirteen.
It happened on a camping trip sponsored by one of the youth organizations that derived from the old Stalhhelm. The morning was colorless with fog when we bivouacked on the left bank of the Sola. I unrolled my sleeping bag, quite unthinkingly, though I noticed the patches of arrow grass, the familiar three-pronged marsh plant, with its burst points. That night the arrow grass filled me with inklings, and disquieted me, as Odilo slept. When I awoke, the air was warm and the night was clear beneath the deep and uncrackable code of the stars. We sat around the fire, as you do, and sang and chanted and yodeled; then I picked up the buckets and went with Dieter, whom Odilo loved, to bring water to the shallows. And there it was: the confluence of the rivers under a hunter’s moon, and the railway tracks in their arrested journey.
Later we filed past the site. There were about twenty brick hovels, apparently held together by their own filth (Austrian artillery barracks, for the War), and, a little farther on, several ridiculously undistinguished buildings, which belonged, I learned, to the Polish Tobacco Monopoly. Oswiecim. Auschwitz. Beyond, through the birch wood, lay Birkenau: beyond, through the birch wood, lay birchy Birkenau, where I was in harmony with the engine of nature. Everything was miserable and innocent. All the quiddity, all the power and wonder, had been washed away by time and weather.
—————
I’m three years old now and living, in rather reduced circumstances, on the southern edge of a town called Solingen.
Solingen is famous for its knives, its scissors, and its surgical instruments. From a catchment area that spans much of central Europe, the knives, the scissors, and the surgical instruments are gathered here in Solingen and turned into steel. Also, and quite nearby, we can offer golf, riding, tennis, and archery. Finally, modest Solingen harbors a proud secret. I’m the only one who happens to know what that secret is. It’s this: Solingen is the birthplace of Adolf Eich-mann. Schh . . . Hush now. I’ll never tell. And if I did, who would believe me?
Soon I’ll be born too. This terraced house will be my birthplace. It’s a pretty tense situation, I suppose, but I don’t let it get me down. In fact my lucid intervals are increasingly brief and rare. Father is a sallow-fleshed skeleton with half a right foot. Mother is like warm pastry in the icing of her nightdress. She is a nurse: she works in Solingen’s Home for the Old. Odilo’s days are fabulous drugs but we still need to cry sometimes until Father takes the pain away with a rhythmical upward sweep of his rattling hand. Then we are happy again (and up to no good). Mother’s faith is intercessionary; but he has the power. The morning coos at Odilo and me in a language only we can hear. To our mother we say things like:
“Mummy? Chickens are alive. We catch them and burn them—and then they’re dead! But you can’t eat chicks. Not little good chicks. Because chicks are good. You can just stroke them and everything. But you can eat ducks. Because ducks are fat.”
Wait. Mistake there. Mistake. Category . . . We brang. We putten. We brang, we putten, their own selves we tooken all away. Why so many children and b bies? What