2666 (125 page)

Yes,
it wouldn't be the first time, I thought, but not my peasants. And even if they
were guilty, what could I do? Throw them all in prison? And what would I gain
by that? Should I let the fields lie fallow? Should I fine them and make them
poorer than they already were? I decided I couldn't do that. Investigate
further, I wrote under his message. And then I wrote: good work.

The
secretary smiled at me, raised his hand, moved his lips as if he were saying
Heil
Hitler,
and tiptoed off. At that moment the adolescent voice asked:

"Are you still
there?"

"I'm
here," I said.

"Look,
with the situation as it is we have no transportation available to collect the
Jews. Administratively they belong to
Upper Silesia
.
I've talked to my superiors and we're in agreement that the easiest and best
thing would be for you to dispose of them."

I
didn't answer.

"Do you
understand?" asked the voice from
Warsaw
.

"Yes,
I understand," I said.

"Then we have
a solution, don't we?"

"That's
right," I said. "But I'd like to receive the order in writing,"
I added. I heard a pealing laugh at the other end of the line. It could be my
son's laugh, I thought, a laugh that conjured up country afternoons, blue
rivers full of trout, and the scent of fistfuls of flowers and grasses.

"Don't
be naive," said the voice without a hint of arrogance, "these orders
are never issued in writing."

That
night I couldn't sleep. I understood that what they were asking me to do was to
eliminate the Greek Jews myself and at my own risk. From my office the next
morning I called the mayor, the fire chief, the police chief, and the president
of the War Veterans Association and summoned them to a meeting at the club. The
fire chief said he couldn't come because he had a mare about to foal, but I
told him this wasn't a game of dice, it was something much more urgent. He
wanted to know what the matter was. You'll find out soon enough, I said.

When
I got to the club they were all there, around a table, listening to an old
waiter tell jokes. On the table was fresh-baked bread and butter and jam. When
he saw me, the waiter was quiet. He was an old man, short and very thin. I sat
in an empty chair and requested a cup of coffee. When it came I asked the
waiter to leave us. Then, briefly, I explained to the others the situation we
were in.

The
fire chief said a call should be made immediately to the head of some camp that
would take the Jews. I said I had already talked to a man at Chelmno, but the
fire chief interrupted me and said we should contact a camp in
Upper Silesia
. The discussion went on like this for a
while. They all had friends who knew someone who was friends with someone else,
et cetera. I let them talk, calmly drank my coffee, split a roll and spread
half with butter and ate it. Then I put jam on the other half and ate it. The
coffee was good. It wasn't like the coffee from before the war, but it was
good. When I had finished I told them that every possibility had been
considered and the order to dispose of the Greek Jews was unequivocal. The
problem is how, I said. Do you have any ideas?

The
others exchanged glances and no one said a word. To break the uncomfortable
silence more than anything else, I asked the mayor how his cold was. I doubt
I'll survive the winter, he said. We all laughed, thinking he was joking, but
in fact he was serious. Then we talked about country things, some boundary
problems caused by a stream that had changed course overnight, shifting an
inexplicable and capricious ten yards, a phenomenon for which no one could
provide a convincing explanation and that affected the property titles of two
neighboring farms whose border was marked by the wretched stream. I was also
asked about the investigation of the missing shipment of potatoes. I downplayed
the matter. They'll turn up, I said.

At
midmorning I returned to my office and the Polish boys were already drunk and
playing soccer.

I
let two days go by without coming to any decision. No Jews died and one of my
secretaries organized three gardening brigades, in addition to the five
sweeping brigades. Each brigade was made up of ten Jews and, besides tidying
the town squares, they cleared a strip of land along the road, land the Poles
had never cultivated and that we, for lack of time and manpower, hadn't either.
Little else happened, as I recall.

An
enormous sense of boredom overtook me. At night, when I got home, I ate alone
in the kitchen, shivering with cold, staring at some vague point on the white
walls. I didn't even think anymore about my son killed in
Kursk
, or put on the radio to listen to the
news or light music. In the mornings I played dice at the station bar and I
listened to the lewd jokes of the peasants who gathered there to pass the time,
without entirely understanding them. Thus two days of inactivity passed,
dreamlike, and then two more.

But work was piling
up and one morning I knew I could no longer avoid the problem. I called my
secretaries. I called the police chief. I asked the chief how many armed men he
could spare to deal with the matter. He said it depended, but in a pinch he
could call up eight.

"And what do
we do with them then?" asked one of my secretaries.

"We're going
to solve that right now," I said.

I
sent the police chief away but ordered him to keep in close contact with my
office. Then, followed by my secretaries, I went out and we all got in my car.
The driver drove us to the outskirts of the village. For an hour we meandered
along back roads and old cart tracks. In some places there was still snow on
the ground. I stopped at a few farms that struck me as ideal and talked to the
farmers, but they all came up with excuses and posed objections.

I've been too kind to these people, I said to myself, it's time I
got tough. But it isn't in my nature to be tough. There was a hollow that one
of my secretaries knew about some ten miles from town. We went to look at it.
It wasn't bad. It was in a remote spot, lots of pine trees, dark soil. The
bottom of the hollow was covered in masses of fleshy leaves. According to my
secretary, people came here in the spring to hunt rabbits. The place wasn't far
from the road. When we got back to the city I had decided what had to be done.

The
next morning I went in person to fetch the police chief at his house. On the
sidewalk in front of my office, eight policemen gathered, joined by four of my
men (one of my secretaries, my driver, and two clerks) and two farmers,
volunteers who were there simply because they wanted to participate. I told
them to act with dispatch and to return to my office to inform me of what had
happened. The sun wasn't up yet when they left.

At
five in the afternoon the police chief and my secretary returned. They looked
tired. They said everything had gone according to plan. They had stopped at the
old tannery and left town with two brigades of sweepers. They had walked ten
miles. They had turned off the road and headed with weary steps toward the
hollow. And there the deed had been done. Was there chaos? Did chaos reign? Did
chaos prevail? I asked. A little, they answered sulkily, and I chose not to
press them.

The next morning the same
operation was repeated, with a few changes: rather than two volunteers we had
five, and three policemen were replaced by three others who hadn't taken part
in the previous day's labors. Among my men there were changes, too: I sent the
other secretary and no clerks, although the driver remained part of the
contingent.

Midway
through the afternoon another two brigades of sweepers disappeared and that
night I sent the secretary who hadn't been at the hollow and the fire chief to
organize four new brigades. Before nightfall I set out to visit the scene. We
had an accident or a near accident and swerved off the road. My driver, I could
see at once, was more agitated than usual. I asked what was wrong. You can
speak frankly, I said.

"I don't know, excellency," he answered. "I feel
strange, it must be the lack of sleep."

"Aren't you
sleeping?" I asked.

"It's
hard, excellency, it's hard, God knows I try, but it's hard."

I
promised him he had nothing to worry about. Then he got the car back on the
road and we drove on. When we arrived I took a flashlight and made my way along
a ghostly path. The animals seemed to have suddenly retreated from the area
around the hollow. From now on, I thought, this is the realm of insects. My
driver followed me a little reluctantly. I heard him whistle and I asked him to
stop. At a glance the hollow looked just as it had the first time I saw it.

"And the
hole?" I asked.

"Over there," said the driver, pointing toward the far
end of the expanse.

I had no desire to undertake a closer inspection and I went home.
The next day my troop of volunteers, with the obligatory variations I had
imposed for reasons of mental hygiene, returned to work. By the end of the week
eight brigades of sweepers had disappeared, which made a total of eighty Greek
Jews, but after the Sunday rest a new problem arose. The taxing work had begun
to take its toll on the men. The volunteers from the farms, of whom there had
been as many as six at a certain point, were reduced to one. The town police
complained that their nerves were frayed and when I tried to urge them on I
could see they really were at the breaking point. My office staff were either
unwilling to continue to take an active part in the operations or they suddenly
fell ill. My own health, I discovered one morning as I was shaving, hung by a
thread.

I asked them,
nevertheless, for a final effort, and that morning, after a notable delay, they
escorted two more brigades of sweepers to the hollow. Waiting for them, I was
unable to work. I tried, but I couldn't. At six in the evening, after dark,
they returned. I heard them singing in the streets, I heard them bid each other
farewell. It was clear that most of them were drunk. I didn't blame them.

The
police chief, one of my secretaries, and my driver came up to my office, where
I awaited them engulfed in the darkest foreboding. I remember that they sat
(the driver remained standing by the door) and it wasn't necessary for them to
say anything in order for me to understand how much and to what degree the
appointed task was wearing them down. Something will have to be done, I said.

That
night I didn't sleep at home. I rode around town, in silence, with my driver at
the wheel smoking a cigarette I had given him. At some point I fell asleep in
the backseat, wrapped in a blanket, and I dreamed that my son was shouting
onward! ever onward!

I was stiff all
over when I woke up. It was three in the morning when I stopped at the mayor's
house. At first no one answered my knock and I almost kicked the door down.
Then I heard hesitant footsteps. It was the mayor. Who's there? he asked, in
what I imagined was a weasel's voice. That night we talked until dawn. The next
Monday, instead of leading more brigades of sweepers out of town, the police
waited for the appearance of the young soccer players. In total, they rounded
up fifteen boys. I had them brought into the town hall and I headed there
myself with my secretaries and driver. When I saw them, so terribly pale, so
terribly thin, so terribly in need of soccer and alcohol, I felt sorry for
them. Standing motionless there, they seemed less like children than like the
skeletons of children, abandoned sketches, pure will and bone.

I
told them there would be wine for all of them and also bread and sausages. No
reaction. I repeated what I had said about the wine and food and added that
there would probably also be something they could take home to their families.
I interpreted their silence as acquiescence and I sent them to the hollow in a
truck, accompanied by five policemen and a load of ten rifles and a machine gun
that, I had been informed, was always jamming. Then I ordered the rest of the
policemen, accompanied by four armed peasants whom I forced to participate
under threat of reporting their regular thieving to the state, to escort three
full brigades of sweepers to the hollow. I also gave orders that no Jew should
leave the old tannery for any reason whatsoever.

At two in the afternoon the
policemen who had led the Jews to the hollow returned. They ate at the station
bar and by three they were on their way back to the hollow with thirty more
Jews. At ten they all returned, the escorts and the drunken boys and the
policemen who had led the boys and taught them how to handle guns.

Everything
went well, said one of my secretaries, the boys put their hearts into it, and
those who wanted to watch watched and those who didn't went away and came back
when it was all over. The next day, I caused a rumor to be spread among the
Jews that they were all being transported—in small groups because of our lack
of resources—to a work camp properly equipped for their stay. Then I talked to
a group of Polish mothers, who were easily soothed, and from my office I
oversaw two new transfers of Jews to the hollow, in groups of twenty.

But problems resurfaced when it snowed again. According to one of
my secretaries, there was no way to dig new graves in the hollow. I told him
that must be impossible. In the end, the problem lay in the way the graves had
been dug, horizontally rather than vertically, all across the hollow, and not
very deep. I organized a group and resolved to fix the problem that same day.
The snow had erased any trace of the Jews. We began to dig. After a little
while, I heard an old farmer called Barz shout that there was something there.
I went to look. Yes, there was something.