The Birthday Buyer (15 page)

How far away were her mother and her home! thought Sofia as she tortured herself with doubts about the life beginning to grow inside her. Because she wanted to have that child, wanted it more than anything else in the world. And yet over a few months her hopes had given way to the brutal reality that had trapped her and made her feel painfully defenceless, far from her mother Raca’s loving affections.

The scenes she saw daily in the streets of the ghetto were a perfect enactment of her fear and sense of living on the precipice. That couldn’t be the life she would give her son. And then there were the lists prepared by the Jewish police, who hunted out people for the SS and sent entire families to the camp in Plaszów. What happened to them there? Sofia wondered. Had any member of any family ever returned to tell their story? What newly born child could survive the conditions in a camp? But Sofia couldn’t imagine how removed from reality were the scenes going through her mind, because she had next to no idea, when she tried to think through her fears, of what a real concentration camp was like. No, she wouldn’t have her child, she convinced herself, then immediately changed her mind: yes, yes, she would have it. Frankie her cousin never found out because Sofia never got to ask her advice and ask her to help her abort.

Over the course of those days, she avoided Yakov, who was forced to sell his calendar with views of Jamaica and was very grief-stricken. Unable to hide her sorrow sufficiently not to arouse suspicions, she tried to ensure people didn’t see her looking so worried. She finally asked Frankie to send her apologies to Yakov and Artur because she was suffering from “women’s things.” That sparked off in Yakov intense, cheerful curiosity just in case those “women’s things” were a euphemism for pregnancy, which Sofia categorically denied. But Yakov’s ingenuous glee encouraged her to think yes, she would have that child, whatever the cost. Let life run its course, she finally decided to her relief, though she still tormented herself by thinking how immensely stupid she had been to get pregnant in that place at that time. She reproached herself for such an irresponsible blunder.

And all because she couldn’t stand the way life was so precarious. It annoyed her, although she knew she couldn’t do anything about it: their executioners wanted to starve them to death and were succeeding since everything was so scarce. Clothes, for example, soon wore thin and had to be patched and re-patched. Shoes, for example, broke and there was no way to get new ones. She saw so many people walking barefoot down the streets, or people who had created shoes out of strips of felt or jute! But felt and jute were also in short supply! And then there was the filth. And illness. And petty hates: people argued, came to blows, even wrought revenge and killed their own neighbors, tired of having to share every inch of ground and every minute of life in the ghetto.

Then Sofia and Yakov suffered their worst ever experience in the time they’d been there. One afternoon, when they were walking along, silently, aimlessly, they came to the cemetery; they went a few feet inside from the street and saw how carts kept coming in piled high with bodies without coffins. They saw how frightened, tearful adolescents put them in barrows that were destined for open graves splattered with quicklime. That was the moment when Jamaica ceased to exist for Yakov and the memories of Rzeszów and their happy moments, laughter, caresses and security in the family house, and their favorite smells and tastes ceased to exist for both of them. Everything sank deep into that enormous open grave they could see from the entrance to the cemetery. Goodbye as well to the future, to plans for an engineering business, or plans to study the engines of tanks, tractors, Mercedes Benz and BMW. Goodbye to any possibility. Time was no longer moving forward; time had ground to a halt.

“Now we’ll never grow old,” said Sofia, giving Yakov a hug and looking away from the grave.

“It makes no sense to talk about the future,” said Yakov grimly while he stroked Sofia’s hair.

“Yakov, all our future now is what happens tomorrow, and I can’t much believe in tomorrow,” said Sofia.

“My love, I so miss the time when we were children in Rzeszów and no one was persecuting us,” said Yakov.

They stayed silent, united in their embrace, while nearby the burial people continued their sad round of work. Yakov suddenly separated out from Sofia, looked her in the eyes and said, “I am glad you aren’t pregnant. I don’t want us to have children. Promise me we will never have children, promise!”

“I promise,” replied Sofia without hesitating. She’d decided to abort. Yakov was right. The very different words Yakov had said to her on their wedding day rushed into her head,“We will have lots of children and I will love you for a hundred years.” Reality changes everything.

Chaos came on August 7.

The morning when Sofia had decided to tell Yakov the truth about her pregnancy and the decision she’d finally taken, he left the house very early with Artur. Sofia got up feeling sick and saw cousin Frankie in the kitchen. She didn’t feel spirited enough to ask her right then whether she knew anyone who carried out abortions. A forlorn tension haunted her eyes, and she avoided her cousin’s gaze so as not to betray her thoughts. Instead, Frankie, who was in a good mood, rattled on and on about Artur having to get up earlier and earlier in order to try and sell the books from his chemistry teacher’s library, and how he’d discovered he could make more money if he sold them separately but he had to get up earlier, almost when it was still nighttime, to find a buyer, because everything was now being bought and sold in the ghetto. Then she spoke about a dress she’d have to sell sooner or later. Sofia’s worries were thus buried beneath a pile of trivia and she gradually relaxed.

At eight o’clock they heard brakes screeching down in the street, followed by loud shouting. Sofia looked out of the window and saw lots of soldiers running in every direction, including toward the entrance to their house. The sound of boots got louder and louder. Shots were suddenly being fired on the staircase. They banged on their door. Frankie’s daughters woke up frightened and Sofia and her cousin looked at each other. They said things, perhaps the most important sentences they’d ever uttered, but didn’t hear each other. They banged insistently on the door. Once, twice. The third time, Frankie, shaking all over, walked over to open the door, but a burst of submachine gunfire from the stairs hit her in the chest and she crashed to the floor. Four bleeding wounds streaked her front from her shoulders to her pelvis. She was lying on her back, her eyes open. Sofia, panic-stricken, couldn’t think what to do. However, pushed and shoved by the soldier responsible for the shooting she had the presence of mind to shield the daughters from the sight of their mother’s corpse as they left the flat. It had all happened very quickly. Two or three minutes.

In the street they were separating men from women and forcing them into trucks. Sofia walked as if through the air, dragged along by the inertia of hundreds of women who, screaming and panicking, were being pulled, like her, this way and that by the different huddles around the trucks. In one of these to-ings and fro-ings she lost the girls, who were put in another truck. She was left feeling desperate. Was
that
really happening?

She couldn’t bring any order to the thoughts in her head. She reacted quickly, but her brain went thick and fuzzy as she had to struggle not to fall to the ground, because they shot or rifle-butted to death anyone who fell down. She gradually became aware of the extent of the horror she was facing. In the wake of her cousin’s death, the mere thought of which made her shake in fear, she now realized she would never see Yakov again, or Artur, or the girls, that Yakov would never find her, and that idea distressed her more than any other. She started to imagine, with all the sorrow her soul held, that Yakov was already dead, that he might have been one who fell trying to escape or running off thinking he had a chance, because Yakov always thought he had a chance and was always sure of himself. Those are the brave ones. Then, when she was being shoved into a truck, she thought she spotted Yakov and Artur in another truck.

“Yakov! Yakov! Yakov!” she shouted from the truck she managed to peer out of after she’d pushed three women away with her fists, but her voice was inaudible above the screams and wailing.

Then she lost sight of the truck where she thought she’d seen Yakov and Artur. It had left with the convoy of men. It was an illusion, a mirage of Sofia’s. Yet it was true: Yakov and Artur were in that truck, were on their way to Auschwitz where Artur would be gassed on arrival. They had been arrested two blocks from their house, still carrying the book they were hoping to sell. Yakov didn’t see Sofia’s truck, but he was certain they’d only rounded up men that day, that the women were safe. Artur, on the other hand, was more pessimistic. He knew that they’d already emptied several blocks of dwellings so they could demolish them later on. If not, where did those empty lots in the ghetto suddenly appear from? It was like eliminating animal burrows.

How quickly happiness had disappeared! thought Sofia, devastated in the back of the truck that hadn’t driven off, that was parked in the street, still as an island of grief: you only had to see the faces of the women and girls huddled next to her. Only she and her unborn son existed at the end of that tunnel that the small universe of her life had entered that morning. Sofia now saw it clearly—the child, who in her plans, despite herself, ought to die, would perhaps be the only one of them to survive. In some paradoxically cruel way the Germans had decided for her: they wanted him for themselves, fate was taking possession of that child.

Sofia stopped talking to her son as if he were someone who’d never exist, someone dead in her belly, and now began to beg he’d have what she most liked about Yakov, his good sense of humor, cheerfulness, sweet charm, nobility, innocence and courage. She wanted her son to inherit all that from his father whom she was sure he would never meet. Her firm desire to give birth to that child now gave new value to her existence. She didn’t know where she was heading, but her son would be born.

At eleven thirty, the truck that took Sofia to the camp in Auschwitz finally drove off.

Born on the snow
.

On March 5, 1942, at 8:55 a.m., Sofia Pawlicka, Cèrmik by her maiden name, from Rzeszów, went into labor and gave birth to a boy in a hidden corner of barrack 115 in the women’s camp in Birkenau, in Auschwitz II. It was snowing and the temperature had gone down to several degrees below zero. The baby was small and scrawny because his mother was so weak and everything suggested he wouldn’t survive.

Sofia had to endure many afflictions, especially to avoid her pregnancy being noticed during roll call and conceal the changes her body, that grew from month to month, was undergoing. Other women prisoners told her what happened to pregnant women when they reached Auschwitz, and she was determined that wouldn’t happen to her as long as she was alive and she would draw on all her strength to hide that son she carried within her from the Germans. And she succeeded in keeping it secret for several months. To that end, she stayed still, almost paralyzed for long periods of time in places the female SS didn’t usually search, like underneath the barrack, where the prisoners had made a hole for her, where she crouched for hours until she couldn’t feel her legs, that were stiff and numb, or fainted from nervous stress. She also hid inside the latrines or underneath the bunks, right up against the wall, on her back in a space where she could hardly breathe, where rats and insects passed constantly.

In fact most of the pregnant women Sofia heard about were taken to a barrack set apart for them, V3 in Birkenau, three hundred feet or so from barrack 115. They generally kept some seventy or eighty desperate women in there, who arrived with the faint maternal hope they could save their children, but immediately went mad when they discovered what the real purpose of that barrack was. However, nobody lasted long in that place. They provoked premature, aborted births through injections of chemicals or via blows or kicks delivered by the female camp guards. In both cases, mother and child sometimes died simultaneously. I have often wondered why they didn’t gas them straight away when they got off the trains or trucks. But they didn’t because the arbitrary mentality of the Nazis acted in formal, mechanical ways when it came to setting up procedures, and a pregnancy was just another procedure, naturally to produce a life that would have to be immediately terminated, but nevertheless it had to follow its own procedure, except in those cases when a mother resisted too fiercely when being led to the labor barrack, and then she would be sent straight to the gas chambers without a moment’s hesitation. If they didn’t abort and did finally give birth, the SS women snatched the babies from their mother’s arms and killed them immediately, sometimes in the mothers’ presence, by submerging their heads in buckets of water. There were cases when they were handed over to be sent to Germany to be subjected to a programme of
Aryanization
—if the child was fair-haired and blue-eyed. The mothers never knew what the fate of their children was and, generally, soon died from septicemia, since they were taken to the filthiest of barracks where they bled to death or contracted lethal diseases.

Sofia gave birth in the spot under the barrack where she had hidden so often. Crouching, she gave birth on the snow, silently, clenching her lips so she didn’t scream, helped by Sara Ruda Malach—a fellow prisoner and mother of three children that died in the ghetto—who severed her umbilical cord with her teeth. Then they carefully wrapped the child in rags and hid him between straw mattresses. They ran the risk that his crying might betray everyone in the barrack, that they might all be gassed for concealing that child. They were even afraid he would choke to death because Sofia was so rigorous in her efforts to hide him from the female guards. Moreover, Sofia and some of the other prisoners who were aware of the baby’s existence knew there were real dangers they could only fend off with prayers: they knew she could barely feed her child, for whom there was no medicine, that it was freezing cold and that there were the loathsome rats that were Sofia’s obsession ever since the day she saw, near where she was hiding under the barrack, rats fighting and biting over an abandoned baby next to its dead mother. But then a time came when she was forced to think, even if only to herself, against her feelings of tenderness, that that protection was simply a slow death sentence, that sooner or later they would find him, they would find her baby. To proclaim his existence would amount to executing him herself; hoping for a miracle was futile. And she couldn’t cry, her tears had dried up forever. But she would let life decide rather than surrender. And she began by giving him a name: Ari. Yakov would have liked that name. That name and body that were now breathing together in spite of everything.

“You are Ari. Your name is Ari. I hope you’ll be able to say it some day,” Sofia told the child she pressed against her breast, in a faint murmur fraught with silence. The camp’s snow-covered esplanade was beginning to awaken to the realization of hard facts invading like nightmares.

So then, Hurbinek was really Ari. Ari Pawlicka, at least once and only from the whispering lips of his mother. Primo Levi never knew. Henek didn’t either. No one ever did.

The closeness of bodies
.

When I was in Moscow in 1989 I saw a woman who looked as I imagined the mother of Hurbinek—really Ari—to be, that Hurbinek I am creating as Sofia created hers. She was small and vivacious, beautiful and firm, but looked ill. She walked slowly and her glance was very expressive. We were very close for a moment. Then she went on her way without noticing me. Her face stayed with me. I don’t really know why. When I was thinking about Sofia, here, in my room in a Frankfurt hospital, I suddenly thought of that woman I had walked past in the GUM Department Stores and realized that the moment had come to give that memory substance. It was a face from the future I encountered in the past to illustrate a much greater past I entered as an intruder. She had Sofia’s sweet, slightly pale, emaciated face, with prominent bags under eyes that depressed her eye sockets even deeper, perhaps as a result of poor food, or a complete lack of food, or an illness, tuberculosis perhaps. That spectral, skinny face that had suddenly aged, is how I imagine Sofia’s to be, in the weeks after she gave birth.

In barrack 115, packed with bodies that now have nothing, that are themselves their only possession and only identity, Sofia is nursing Ari, always in a state of terrified alert. But she doesn’t eat. Only now and then her Hungarian friend, Sara Ruda Malach, keeps back for her a ration of potato soup. “Our body is what we are, all we have,” Sofia thinks, when she sees herself surrounded by other bodies, bodies everywhere, whose ages no one could ever guess: elderly girls, elderly women bereft of flesh and future, women surviving daily the selection that takes hundreds to the gas chamber. Bodies close to each other. “The immeasurability of immediate closeness,”Walter Benjamin wrote somewhere, as I now recall. How can one measure one’s own history, that brims over in contact with another body, when there is no privacy for bodies that are complete strangers, that don’t love each other, that wouldn’t even know of their existence if it weren’t for that togetherness forced upon them by the camp, that absurd cruelty, reduction to zero, unavoidable reduction to a common fate?

Bodies, in Auschwitz, are near one another, and protect, abhor, detest, touch, accompany one another. Some bodies steal subtly from others (like, for example, the body that snatches from another dying body its bowl of soup, thus enacting life’s implacable law); or snitch on other sick bodies so they take them away, they don’t want to know where—although, of course, they know!—and leave space for those remaining, and leave blankets and shoes. But then the body that has snitched realizes the empty space is being filled by two or three additional bodies, that fight over that space, those shoes and that blanket. Bodies that will finally want to embrace any body whatsoever before dying, as Sofia will do in the last second of her life, several months later.

At night, among the bodies sleeping in barrack 115, Sofia left Ari in the straw and put a small, not very tight muzzle over his mouth to deaden the sound of his frequent, unexpected crying. She knew Ari might choke, but Sofia preferred that terrible possibility to the certainty he would be murdered if his existence were discovered. On many such nights when she couldn’t get to sleep, as in the many preceding months, she tortured herself repeatedly thinking about how she didn’t know what had happened to Yakov. She didn’t want to think he was dead, though she took it for granted on days she felt particularly pessimistic. At other moments she would let herself be lulled by a timid hope, and thought how he must be well and out of that camp; then she’d be tortured by the sorrow Yakov would feel when he thought of her and searched for her everywhere, futilely, never finding her, as he never found Azvel the old bookseller, and never found any views of Jamaica. But Sofia could never know when she was thinking of her family, for example, that they were really so close. Her father-in-law Samuel Pawlicka and her brother-inlaw David died in Auschwitz, a few barracks away, days after Ari was born, that March 5, and worst of all, her elder brothers, Aaron and Stefan Cèrmik, taken in a round-up in Rzeszów and hurled into a cattle truck that dropped them on a platform in Auschwitz at midnight, were gassed at the very moment she arrived in the camp. The bodies, beloved bodies of beloved beings, had for a time been close, very close, gathered together forever.

But later when Ari was two months old, he began to be her greatest torture. And the torture grew because only she knew when she had those unexpected flashes of that horrific though righteous thought about killing him with her own hands, to save him from all that future pain. A thought that came to her the first time under barrack 115, immediately after her son was born. She’d never ruled it out completely. It was her most private, lacerating secret. Then, she thought, if she did do it, she’d throw herself at the electrified fence. She wouldn’t be able to live a second more.

She was tortured by the filth in which they lived, a source of infection for Ari and herself. What would be of her son if she died first? The clothing wrapped around Ari was full of bits from his defecations, earth and grease stains, bits of other people’s dirt, filth that carried the filth of others. And yet Sofia had got over her revulsion. One day she discovered her own body had sores. She’d been infected with horrible boils, her friend Sara Ruda was to blame, devored as she was by lice and fleas, and the boy as well. The sores had reached her mouth, that was covered in ulcers, just like her baby’s, whose lips were strips of raw flesh. Moreover, Ari wasn’t growing; he fitted in the small hollow shaped by her hands.

Time went by, Ari was three months old. Feeding him was agony as death drew nearer and nearer. A prisoner, who said she was a doctor, although she’d admitted to Sofia she had in fact only been a doctor’s lover, confirmed that malnutrition was advancing. Sofia could do nothing; she was one more defeated woman.

The evasive glances from the other bodies refused to meet hers. They were forlorn glances. And I imagine and see them in Frankfurt, exchanged by the patients in this hospital, as I’ve seen them at other times in my life. It is easy enough, if you know how. They meld with uneasy looks: what’s happening, what’s dream, what’s reality. And the glances finally become disconsolable grief. They watched Sofia in her colossal struggle to keep her child alive, but they knew that today or tomorrow neither would be there. Dream: no dreams were possible, only a dream of eating. Dreams cannot be interpreted, cannot be deciphered in terms of any another reality. Dreams are what they are, an additional, different, distanced reality. Sofia would like to dream of food, of food for her and her son. But she avoided dreams, avoided that luxury, even avoided sleep, because when she slept, exhausted by tiredness, Sofia knew that when she woke up, Ari’s body, in her lap, an extension of herself, might perhaps be frozen or crushed.

No one laughs
.

My thoughts now turned back to Yakov. He arrived in the camp the same week as Sofia, after spending several days exposed to the elements in Plaszów, where an SS officer put an unloaded revolver to his temple every morning, laughed and said, “Tomorrow, tomorrow, right!” He came in a truck that formed part of a convoy of twenty-two trucks packed with Jews from the whole of Galicia. He recognized faces from the Podgórze ghetto and was scared. He was still with Artur, who kept by his side all the time, weeping despondently, interminably, when he thought of his daughters and Frankie, whose murder was unknown to him. But Artur was separated from him as soon as they reached Auschwitz, and taken with the majority of those men to the barrack next to the gas chambers and crematoria. Yakov said goodbye because he knew where his friend was headed.

They sent the remainder to a large esplanade before allotting them to a barrack. They forced them to witness one of the frequent executions. It was an old man and a young man, barely an adolescent. They were on the point of hanging them, had just put a rope round their necks. The scaffold was very basic, made from white timber; it rocked at every movement; prisoners were underneath with barrows ready to collect the bodies. Only the fifteen-year-old whimpered things Yakov, who happened to be in the front row, couldn’t understand. He was Russian and had pushed a German soldier who was whipping the old man. Now both young man and old were paying for that with a lesson for everyone.

Later on, in the barrack, Yakov’s thoughts returned to those he had left behind. To his family in Rzeszów, to his beloved Sofia, who he thought was free along with Frankie somewhere in the ghetto or perhaps, in his most utopian moments, had escaped from there and been hidden by Raca in a corner of her big house on Ta rgova Street. His imagination couldn’t harbor anything tainted by reality. He didn’t know the fates of his father and brother. He didn’t know Sofia was pregnant. After a few months, Yakov would wander through the camp, would go to and from the Krupp workshops where he worked as a slave, and not even suspect that his own son, whose existence he was totally unaware of, would be born and survive in that appalling factory of death.