got into us? Why so many? We were cruel: the children weren’t even going to be here for very long. I choiced it, did I? Why? Because babies are fat? . . . But now we’re away, running through the field where every living thing flourishes in desperate abandon, and lurching each second between joy and horror, our mind full of nonsensical objections to nonsensical premises, and ignorant and innocent, never having known anyone, even Irene, even Rosa, even Herta, even the Jews and the others I made.
Only Mother. Our relations are already very intimate and, if everything goes through okay, will soon get more intimate still. For instance, many, many hours of every day and night I shall spend cradled in her arms, kissing her breasts. (It will be allowed. He can’t stop it.) Then eventually our corporeal bond will be tied, with Solingen scissors. When I enter her, how she will weep and scream. That I am gone. Odilo himself doesn’t know how much power we have over her and how much she loves us: he doesn’t sense her when she comes in the night and loosens our blankets and feels our brow and cries with worry when we’re sick. . . . Soon, Father will have her all to himself. I think he is starving. He is as thin as a Muselmann. When he eats, he just doesn’t come up with enough. Not enough—not enough to keep body and soul together. It is with an internal smirk that I call him Fatti. His furious, unforgiving, defeated look: his eyes are grimed with it, his face is nutcrackered with defeat and with unhealed wounds. He will probably improve, after the War. His ruined foot will improve. Naturally I cannot forgive my father for what he will have to do to me. He will come in and kill me with his body. Odilo knows this and feels this too.
I must make one last effort to be lucid, to be clear. What finally concerns me are questions of time: certain durations. Even as things stood, the Jews were made o wait too
long in city squares, with their children getting difficult, and I now know how difficult they can get, when they start creating: how quickly their worlds can fall away. The Jews were made to wait too long in summer meadows, under racing skies, where families were often united by procedures that involved too much suspense, with children running this way and that and stopping still with their hands raised like claws, searching, and babies on the ground every few yards in shawls, crying, with no parents readily available, for much too long. . . . Now Odilo’s dreams are all colors and noises, rapturous or dread filled, but with no content, not anymore.
He pauses for a moment, in the field. Only a moment. There are no larger units of his time. He has to act while childhood is still here, while everything is his playmate— including his ca-ca. He has to act while childhood is still here, before somebody comes and takes it away. And they will come. I hope the doctor will be wearing something nice, something appropriate, and not the white coat and the black boots, which surely . . . Myself. Mistake. Mistake. We brang, we putten. Look! Beyond, before the slope of pine, the lady archers are gathering with their targets and bows. Above, a failing-vision kind of light, with the sky fighting down its nausea. Its many nuances of nausea. When Odilo closes his eyes, I see an arrow fly—but wrongly. Point first. Oh no, but then . . . We’re away once more, over the field. Odilo Unverdorben and his eager heart. And I within, who came at the wrong time—either too soon, or after it was all too late.
AFTERWORD
This book is dedicated to my sister Sally, who, when she was very young, rendered me two profound services. She awakened my protective instincts; and she provided, if not my earliest childhood memory, then certainly my most charged and radiant. She was perhaps half an hour old at the time. I was four.
I also owe a great debt to my friend Robert Jay Lifton. Two summers ago I found myself considering the idea of telling the story of a man’s life backward in time. Then, one afternoon, after a typically emotional encounter on the tennis court, Lifton gave me a copy of his book The Nazi Doctors. My novel would not and could not have been written without it. Probably the same applies to the works of Primo Levi, in particular If This Is a Man, The Truce, The Drowned and the Saved, and Moments of Reprieve. Other writers whom I found especially helpful, for various reasons, include Martin Gilbert, Gitta Sereny, Joachim Fest, Arno Mayer, Erich Fromm, Simon Wiesenthal, Henry Orenstein, and Nora Wain. At the back of my mind I also had a ce tain short