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Published by

Slovene Writers’ Association

Slovene P.E.N.

Association of the Slovene Literary Translators

From 1962 published under the title of

Le livre Slovène

Boris Pahor

A Difficult Spring

Translated from the Slovenian by

Erica Johnson Debeljak

Društvo slovenskih pisateljev

The Slovene Writers’ Association

Ljubljana, 2016

BORIS PAHOR

A DIFFICULT SPRING

Translated from:

Boris Pahor: Spopad s pomladjo, 1978

Editor-In-Chief

Ivo Svetina, President

Head Editor of Litterae Slovenicae

Alenka Jovanovski

Edited by

Cvetka Bevc and Špela Pavlič

Translation into English

Erica Johnson Debeljak

Cover photo

Maksimiljana Ipavec/Primorske novice

E-Book available online at

http://www.biblos.si/lib/

Ljubljana 2016

Editing board of Litterae Slovenicae

Alenka Jovanovski (Head), Lela B.Njatin, Dušan Čater, Veronika Simoniti and Damjan Šinigoj.

Issued and published by Slovene Writers’ Association, Ljubljana

CIP - Kataložni zapis o publikaciji

Narodna in univerzitetna knjižnica, Ljubljana

821.163.6(450.36)-311.2(0.034.2)

821.163.6(450.36).09Pahor B.(0.034.2)

PAHOR, Boris, 1913-

A difficult spring [Elektronski vir] / Boris Pahor ; translated from the Slovenian by Erica Johnson Debeljak. - El. knjiga. - Ljubljana : Slovene Writers’ Association : Slovene P. E. N. : Association of the Slovene Literary Translators, 2016. - (Litterae Slovenicae : Slovenian literary magazine, ISSN 1318-0177 ; 2009, 2-3)

Prevod dela: Spopad s pomladjo

ISBN 978-961-6995-08-5 (ePub)

COBIS ID 284724992

Far more effectively than the bands playing in the square, these ecstatic couples, locked together, hardly speaking, proclaimed in the midst of the tumult of rejoicing, with the proud egotism and injustice of happy people, that the plague was over, the reign of terror ended.

Albert Camus, The Plague

The train rushed smoothly over the Holland plains and softly, unbelievably softly, rocked on its springs. Almost too softly for those unaccustomed to such comfort, for those generally not in a situation to enjoy it. Their blue and white striped garments did not match the creamy velvet of the carriage. The jute fabric of their prison stripes rolled and twisted, and their nearly naked skulls were a sad complement to their bony cheeks and staring eye sockets. The high seat backs and creamy upholstery in the carriage was shot with gold and recalled vacant theatre loges. Luxurious and silent loges, which someone had given these impossible travellers. Actually not given, but only ceded to the gaunt creatures temporarily. The stripes on their uniforms looked like broken sticks tossed on and between the velvet seats; the people in the sticks like the remains of some unknown tribe. They’d probably been found in a mine shaft more than a hundred metres deep or in the throat of some extinguished volcano; or perhaps nobody knew exactly where they’d been found. And it somehow seemed that the train rocked so softly out of a kind of sensitivity, and at the same time out of an almost unperceivable caution, that its carriages might be polluted by too much contact with this impure cargo.

He sat beside the window. He had been stretched out before, his legs extended onto the opposite seat, his body supine and given over to the intoxicating cotton rocking. But then another windmill appeared and he sat up; it was an automatic movement in response to his amazement at the sight of the rare farmhouse beside the tracks. As if he needed to impress in his consciousness the image of the little homestead, but above all because some women and children had emerged from the doorway of the little house amidst the greenery and were waving little handkerchiefs at the train. One of the women was wiping her eyes with one hand and shaking the handkerchief with the other. And also because the little house was located on uncontaminated soil and the returning deportee observed the land with a calm and deliberate curiosity. He was searching for any sign of human history, an image of the life that had continued among real people during his absence; he searched with eyes that were both weary and unbelieving.

Most of the other travellers did not rise from their seats and go to the window; they were too weak. The news of Dutch women standing in front of their houses only brought a tired smile, like that on a sleeping man’s face, to the corners of their mouths.

The golden velvet of the seats paled as the train’s springs gently rocked the travellers into the ever thickening grey of evening. And it seemed to him that they were travelling to the far end of a dark land, to an empty coast where each of them would face his own unknown and savage fate.

“We organized our departure masterfully,” René said enthusiastically into the darkness.

“It’s lucky that Jean and Marcel are so handy,” responded François with a voice that, though tranquil, revealed a flash of self-confidence.

They had agreed to disembark at Harzungen, and there he found himself amidst a throng of skeletal bodies and again heard the wheezing lament of rib cages and saw even more clearly the unbelievably long line of train cars that had been traversing between the two front lines for five days now, meandering without destination it seemed, heavy from the weight of destroyed human cargo. The travelling necropolis of upright, tightly packed, zebra-striped bodies, in which even those that had stopped living did not fall to the ground. This caravan of death could not be compared with other transports and thus an endless series of coffins waited at the Celle station before the open doors of the long convoy.

The train stopped and Pierre stood up and swayed a bit before unbolting and opening the door of the compartment.

“This is Brussels,” he said.

“Brussels?” François asked with a yawn.

But Pierre was already in the corridor, using all his force to push down the window pane.

“It is Brussels, isn’t it?” he asked, answering his question the same moment he asked it.

They went out to the corridor to wave to the city from the window and girls wearing the white dresses of the Red Cross came toward them with warm drinks in cups and sweet intrusion in their voices. They were timid and gentle in their anxiety not to miss any aspect of caring for these bodies.

A faint steam rose from the tin pots and spread a sweet-smelling aroma of tea into the night air; it was as if the men were enfolded in the memory of blossoming linden surrounded by a swarm of droning bees.

After their reception in Paris, they lined up under the showers and thoughts returned to him of thin bodies and bare skulls under the boiling water there. But he was able to push away these images because of the loud and clownish play of the former prisoners of war in the neighbouring stalls; they at least were not suffering in the shower from visions of death as were the returning deportees. The former prisoners of war joked in their military fashion, calling through the walls, climbing over them, noisily washing, cursing the water, laughing in a chorus, vigorously splashing as if they wanted to wash all people once and for all.

Although he could not join in their playfulness, he had to smile. It was pleasant to hear the full, manly voices with their healthy animal tone and the innuendos about their comrades’ organs that were supposed to guarantee the continuation of the human race. But the returning deportee could not take part. Although it was a pleasure to feel the warm streams of water flow like balsam on his body, he was still somehow wounded. And yet he felt he could think more concretely under the shower, think somehow from a distance.

They went through a room where each had his chest x-rayed one after another and then filed into a large space as wide as a dance hall. There were doctors everywhere, standing here and there next to little tables where orderlies wrote out the information dictated to them by the doctors. There were six or seven such groups. The men stood naked, in lines, moving slowly forward.

He noticed that there were only four bodies in front of him. With a sudden embarrassment he realized he would have to present himself to the female doctor because by the time he got to the head of the line there would be nobody else in front of him. She was a middle-aged woman and did her job thoughtfully if a bit absently. It wasn’t a problem to stand naked before her and yet he felt an unexpected humiliation when he realized that the entire history of the camp crouched in his poor body, and this in front of a woman. But he walked up to her simply and naturally when his turn came; it’s always like that, he thought; no matter how much you think about something, when it is time for action everything suddenly becomes simple. The doctor sat on her little stool waiting; she looked a bit odd in her white apron. She seemed concentrated, although not by the herd of naked male bodies in the hall, but by something else she had been thinking about before. As she gently prodded his testicles, she spoke to the orderly who sat at the table to her left; she did this in the same unconscious manner that a woman in the market might test some silken fabric between her fingers as she talks with a friend. Her casualness, though appropriate to the particular situation, was almost insulting. It is interesting that a man who has just been liberated has to have his organs felt in order for a doctor to ascertain that he is still whole. And in this instant, he conjured up his cellmates in that other chamber; all the skeletal remains that had released their last breath with hands over their mummified members. Now the doctor withdrew her hand and placed a stethoscope on his chest and, as the little tambourine in her ear conveyed the sound of his lungs, her eyes slid from attentiveness and became almost maternal. She dictated automatically to the orderly.

He paused indecisively as he left through the large doorway; he was struck by the sudden fear that he would too quickly become a man like any other man walking the streets of Paris. He hesitated on the sidewalk, realizing that if he was different it was only because of his clothes, which caught the eyes of passers-by. That had been the bright idea of the Red Cross. He asked the guard for directions and started to look for the address he had been given in the labyrinth that was Paris. The crowds in the underground corridors and the masses in the metro rushed through the endless shafts; this is perhaps the most suitable place to welcome a returning deportee, he thought. Not the big city pulse up above on the avenues and boulevards but the darkness of the tunnels underneath the city pavement. There a deportee could continue in his anonymity and homelessness while, above, the living people confirmed his hidden difference. His clothes, of course, troubled him the most, but nobody noticed them in the packed crowd. He would take them off as soon as he could. There were not as many people in the train itself, and he asked a girl, who was standing next to a young man and looking at him, if this was the right place to get off. She said it was. She looked at his clothing and asked him what was meant by the letter in the red triangle on his chest; when he answered that it was the first letter of his nationality, she smiled and said she was Russian. The young man with her was French, she said, and then she asked about the camps. He smiled, saying it was impossible to tell her about them in such a short time. He then murmured something in Russian, more to himself than her. She blushed and he realized that he shouldn’t use the same Russian phrases with a girl in the Paris metro that Vaska had used when they carried corpses on waterlogged mattresses. He was happy when it was time to get off and redeem his world from the shame of the blushing girl.

There weren’t many automobiles in the Place de Trocadero and the wide avenues flowing into it looked like the abandoned arteries of an extinct Europe. It was as if the few automobiles that remained were departing on asphalt rivers that flowed, empty and silent, to the end of the world, and as if, on those lonely roads across the world, they were looking for a living creature who might explain to them the purpose of human settlements, of cities and existence.

The Palais de Chaillot resembled the wings of a monumental tomb. He remembered the embarrassment of the girl in the metro and realized that he was looking through the prism of his own world. Her blushing cheeks, he thought, almost aroused some faint rosy glow around the human image, a glow that could become the birth of the universe; but such a birth now seemed so remote from him that it could hardly be real. Paris unfolded before him and a stiff muscle stirred in his chest, probably in the same way that the heart of a drowned man convulses when it is revived by artificial respiration. The heart hadn’t stopped but had only been dormant. Perhaps we have only been dormant, he said to himself as he walked across the wide marble stage that divided the wings of the palace. He strode along the smooth surface and observed himself from afar as if through the lens of a moving camera; it caught the image of prison stripes in the middle of a terrace bathed in May sunlight. He could find no connection between the image of himself and the light on the pale yellowish marble, still less the amplitude of the city beyond the Eiffel Tower. And so he stood by the stone balustrade and thought that one day in the future this view might stir enthusiasm in him; at the moment, however, he could not grasp the meaning of such infinite size and magnificence. It looked as if it had all been made for a noble, sunny people who had come from somewhere else to live in this wonderful infinity of parks and avenues, boulevards and palaces. But he couldn’t imagine where new residents would come from and, although he knew that centuries of history had constructed this eternal vision, he could not help but regard it with the hard and mutinous chill of the returning deportee. No specific image from there intervened, yet he felt as if he were looking at one huge camp. Because of this feeling, he searched deliberately for an image from there that he might compare with this view. He could find none, except perhaps one. In Dora he had looked down a hill at a wide road that ran between the barracks toward the gates. The gates were broad, and the flat, wide road gave an impression of distance, for one could see that it continued on the other side, beyond the gates. Trucks came in and out through these gates; the guards stood there as if beneath the arches of a drawbridge. Morning and evening, rows of labourers marched to and from work through these gates. Seen from a distance, from a height, they looked like the long lines of some apocalyptic infantry. Because of the stripes on their uniforms, the columns seemed like a horizontal river of greyish, bluish mud.

No, he thought as he descended the stairs, the view from the hill there had nothing in common with the view here, although there must be a connection.

III

With new clothes packed in a tattered suitcase and the knowledge that he was going to Rue Leonardo da Vinci, a man walking along the sidewalk on May 4, 1945, would have a new spring in his step. This might also be due to the people watching him as he walked, for example, on Avenue Kleber or Avenue Victor Hugo, but he knew he was carrying a different self in his suitcase and that he would soon change into it. Perhaps everything was different, too, owing to the names Leonardo da Vinci and Victor Hugo, because now he felt he would be accompanied by good and favourable fortune.

Avenue Victor Hugo was quieter than the other streets as there was almost no traffic on it. The Hugo patriarch presided over the centre of the square, captured in the hush of the day and also in the great silence that lay upon the earth as it might on the ocean after a terrible storm. Rue Leonardo da Vinci was narrow, much too narrow for such a name, and also too short; it was more of a slope than a street and had an iron railing running along its right side all the way up to the top. On the left, almost at the street’s end, a wide door opened onto a rectangular courtyard that had a short extension and trees at the back of it. There a family of children and sturdy lads sat around a long table. They were singing a partisan song and their voices made a thunderous booming sound in the tranquil Parisian neighbourhood. Pure life resided in those voices, and also the rhythm of fishermen rowing or pulling a sail up the mast.

“Buchenwald?” asked a fair-haired broad-chested young man, after they’d finished their song.

“One of its subsidiaries,” he said, attempting a smile.

They passed around aluminium plates and a thin, almost meter-long baguette; the conversation at the table was briefly drowned out by the clatter of spoons and forks. After a moment, a tureen of soup and a tureen with vegetables were brought over and each person helped himself to lunch. As they ate the soup, one could hear the soft sliding of spoons on aluminium. Everything might have been taking place in the pleasant garden of a Sunday restaurant were it not for the talk of fires and cattle cars carrying away mothers and their children.

Vines hung from the wall and the sun illuminated half the table and filled the aluminium plates.

First an old man came into the room where there were bunk beds and packages. He began rummaging through a small rucksack on the upper bunk next to the window.

“We’re going to go for a stroll through Paris,” he said. “Today is our last day.”

Then he was alone.

Suitcases stood against the wall and on beds along with parcels from the American Red Cross; a much larger crate lay closer to the window next to the wall. People were leaving, returning home. And though this was a simple and rational observation, it left him emotionally cold; he wished them well but had no desire to go anywhere. Mija was no more. Without Mija, Trieste was a sunless shore, a sailboat with a broken mast. True, he should worry for the fate of his family; but he sensed that he was being unfair to them because now he connected the very idea of parents to the absurdity of a man’s arrival in this world. It was as if, somewhere in the sand, he’d lost the fluid that flowed invisibly from the past, linking him to his community. And his body felt a resistance to travel, rejected the very thought of it even before he could seriously think about it. He just wanted to lie down. He wanted to lie down for a long, unending time. He wanted nothing but horizontal peace covered with a rough blanket. Because there, a man had to be on guard even when he slept, had to be alert; because being horizontal there could mean the beginning of eternal retreat. Which is why lying down now meant calm without the possibility of ambush, a borderless and motionless peace; because every cell demands its own eternity.

A mother and her little son entered the room, a tall woman with a still-young face, a face that looks thirty-five when rested and happy, or forty-five when worried and silent. She went to the bed in the middle of the room, took a comb from her bag, guided the little boy toward the window and sat him down on the crate. She began to comb his hair.

He raised himself and sat. It would be best if I changed my clothes, he thought. Above all, I have to take off these impossible boots. Why did he put them on in the first place? Perhaps it was a distant desire from childhood to own such boots. When the English forces liberated Belsen, a stranger brought him to the dispensary. To give him some food, soldier’s stew. Here have some stew, and you can keep these boots, the man said. How will boots help me with this cough? The man shrugged and left them on the floor.

Now he took a pair of shoes from his suitcase and used his palms to smooth out the clothes the Red Cross had given him. Then he stepped out from behind the wooden bunk so the woman could see him.

“There’s a bathroom on the ground floor,” she said to ease his embarrassment. He realized that in his prison stripes and untied shoes, he looked like a criminal who had been relieved of his belt and shoelaces so he wouldn’t hang himself or try to escape.

The bathroom was narrow and grey. Water dripped from the shower at even intervals. It was cold but he couldn’t hurry because he had to lean against the door as he slid out of one pant leg and took the shoe off one foot. Then he stepped into the other shoe and slid out of the other pant leg. He repeated this process as he put on the dark blue pants. This way he didn’t have to put his bare feet on the wet floor. A vague, almost contraband feeling settles in a man when he changes into another person. This, he thought, must be how a prisoner feels when he tricks his captors and prepares for flight.

“There you are,” said the woman when he returned to the room. “It’s like New Year’s Day for you!”

“A rather gloomy New Year’s Day.”

“You must wish for something nice,” she said. “I’m sure your wish will come true.”

He smiled as he was seized by a troubling memory of the colourful numerous human company stretching into the past, crossing themselves, all filled with superstitions and symbols.

“Where should I put these?” he murmured, referring to the prison clothes he held in his hands.

“Maybe it would be good if you put them away,” she said into the mirror.

“I should at least have a photograph taken in them,” he said.

The woman turned away from the window and walked toward the centre of the room with the comb in her hand.

“Come with us,” she said, emphasizing the invitation with a wave of her comb.

He carried the blue and white striped prison jacket under his arm. It had a red triangle on the chest with a big letter in the middle and a number underneath. It was a jacket, but it seemed so small that he had the impression he was carrying a dishrag.

“Is he going to take your picture too?” the boy asked. “Is he, mama?”

“Be good,” she said.

They were like a little family walking along the wide avenues after being saved from some universal deluge; there was hardly a living soul in sight. Only the occasional automobile rumbled past as if in search of survivors.

The boy scampered beside his mother on her left side; he was on her right. She was in the middle connecting two worlds as if balancing a scale. And the scale is hanging so low on my side, he thought, because the other side is empty when the boy jumps. Maybe the playfulness of children will bring a beam of morning light to the world, he thought, which is another reason I must get rid of these clothes.

“We’ll be there soon,” said the woman.

Avenue Foch with greenery on both sides was like a bright river flowing through a wooded park. A park must be close by. Perhaps the Bois de Boulogne. A military jeep flashed past on the asphalt river as if rushing from desert to desert. And again the asphalt gave him the impression that the roads ran round and round the sphere of the earth, like a skull from which all the fertile soil has been shaken. Only greenery gives courage to man, he thought, and now the greenery around him was growing thicker. It really was the beginning of a park, with ringing voices emerging from it.

“Mama!” the little boy cried and pulled her by the hand. “Mama!” And the boy’s voice seemed to touch a note in him that had long been mute. Perhaps with the help of that music, he would be able to gather the strength to reassemble the broken pieces of his shattered humanity. Who could say, perhaps it was true – although in Dora, death also played its music at the gates through which columns of men came and went to and from work. The rhythm kept them alive. Though only barely. Because everything is possible for man; the music there, and the rhythms and chords in this green place. They crossed the street and he realized they were in an amusement park and there were barracks among the trees. But these were happy barracks, barracks that held lotteries and ragamuffin clowns, and next to them a merry-go-round that spun like the perpetuum mobile of antique times. So it was. Here a Luna Park and there Buchenwald. Another station on man’s itinerary. Different stations, of course. The only question is, which do you have a ticket for? He stopped.

“Your photographer is here?”

“Well, you’re not going on the merry-go-round, are you?” she replied. And they walked past a stand with rifles. True, a photographer is a photographer, he thought. And rifles are rifles. Only here they are aimed at round targets made of plaster, and the white plaster targets explode like white stars. And here the rifles are nicely arranged, barrel next to barrel, like antique rifles in a museum. And it’s better that way, because it is May in Paris and the war will be over soon.

“Mama,” the little boy called. “Look over there!”

“That’s his aeroplane,” she said to her son.

They stopped beneath the wooden stage and he felt like asking his prison stripes for forgiveness, but the music was rumbling and the merry-go-round turning on the other side of the barracks. Man was now a desert, now music that called out in the middle of the desert like a palm, he thought; now he stands petrified before death, and in the morning he tries like a clumsy bear to take his first steps to the dancing rhythm. This incredible man. This incredible child.

He stepped onto the stage because what had to be done, had to be done quickly.

Mothers and children stood in front of the ticket booth. A fat woman with dangling earrings was nimbly taking their money and handing back tickets.

So now she was handing someone tickets and asking him at the same time:

“You, monsieur?”

But she didn’t wait for his answer.

“You, madame?”

“Nine,” madame responded.

“And you?”

Now he answered: “Nine for me as well!”

“Nine for you?” she asked the lady. “Let’s not waste time, monsieur.”

“Yes,” said the lady.

“Let’s not waste time, monsieur,” she said again, when she took the money.

Now he had a ticket. And he heard the little boy whining: “Mama, when do I get to go? When do I get to go, mama?” The photographer in the black apron, who had been hurriedly putting children on the aeroplane and lighting the lamps and pressing the shutter button, now seemed to be deliberately taking his time.

“Push the aeroplane away,” he said to the photographer.

“Push it away?” The man gave him a devastated look. He held his head a bit to the side and his red-rimmed eyes at once made it clear how sick this unexpected insult made him.

“But why?”

But then he became frightened.

“Madame, the monsieur does not want the aeroplane in the picture!” the photographer cried. “Madame!”

Mothers were swarming before the fat woman to buy their children tickets to get on the aeroplane, and now he didn’t want it and the aeroplane would be flying away at any moment.

“Madame!” he said to the fat woman.

“What is it?” But at the same time, he said to the lady: “Nine, is that right?”

“He doesn’t want the aeroplane!” the photographer said again.

“Let’s not waste time,” she muttered to herself. “And for you, madame?”

Suddenly he decided. He took off his jacket and put on his prison stripes.

“He doesn’t want the aeroplane,” the little man complained.

“Push it away then,” cried the fat woman in front of the clutch of mothers and children. The man in the black apron shrugged his shoulders and turned in confusion to the aeroplane.

“Shall we not waste time, monsieur?” she said again, as if carefully and deliberately answering her own thoughts. The man pushed away the aeroplane, which had a seat nailed to its back so that in the photograph it would look as though the child was flying it. But her time is precious, he thought about the woman – he was now wearing the zebra stripes – and sure enough, time had started once again and begun to run. Or had it been running the whole time we were gone?

“Well, you did it,” said the woman kindly when she returned with her little boy. “Didn’t you?”

A tango started puffing away, probably near the merry-go-round, and this music, it seemed, could actually help lift a very heavy stone. For how many centuries had he not heard that rhythm? And yet now it was as if it had been playing all day long, had always accompanied him on the walks he took with Mija and Jadranka along the Trieste embankment, had accompanied the piles of bones and bombers and flying jackets and cardboard aeroplanes where children were sitting, and the hanged men in the tunnel at Dora and the merry-go-round with its little boats springing up like the petals of a gigantic daisy. It was the triumphant music of a grand comedy in which those who weep must pay for the entry tickets of those who laugh.

“Look, mama, look!” And the boy pulled her by the hand.

“Maybe it would have been better if I had just sat on the aeroplane,” he said.

“Be good,” she chided the child as if she hadn’t heard him.

“Can you imagine? Emaciated, no hair, and in that prison jacket!”

“Don’t be that way,” she said quietly.

“Then you could write under the picture: ‘Flying deportee.’”

“It’s not right that you’re so bitter,” she said in a low voice as if overcome by unexpected sadness.

“Look, mama!” And the child pulled her sharply by the hand. “Look, over there!”

“Now a new life will begin,” she said without looking at him.

They stood in front of the shack like a mother and father whose son is interrupting their worried conversation. It troubled him that he was so sarcastic when she was being so good to him and had innocently invited him to come with her to this particular photographer.

“Look!” the boy said again to his mother.

A row of cardboard heads were arranged on a long shelf in a wooden hut. Wide and narrow heads. One after the other: Mussolini, Göring, Hitler, Ciano, and so forth. Hitler had a little moustache, which was also cardboard. The game was quite simple: the girl gave you five cloth balls and you had to hit the head and knock it off the shelf. At first the head would wobble as if someone had slammed the door. Then no more Mussolini. No more Hitler.

“What will they think of next?” said the woman in a consoled voice, as if she liked it that the boy would have fun in this way. Because, although it was a stupid thing, a person had to be grateful to a petty salesman who could extract a crumb of humour from anything. And even her little son smiled, his lips taking the shape of a butterfly.

But then the girl went behind the shelf and lifted the heads up again. One after the other, all in a line, all the shapes and forms, and then Hitler with his moustache of brown cardboard.

“How did they get up there again, mama, those heads?”

She was silent, and it struck him that she was a subtle woman, that she was strong and simple in a way that he had not been strong and simple for a long time.

And then the little boy remembered: “Why didn’t he want to have his picture taken on the aeroplane, mama?”

The car stopped in front of a clinic surrounded by woods, and as he stepped out, he noticed the doorman closing the wrought iron wings of the great gate. The grey building had a low but wide staircase leading up to the entrance; such a building might have been called a villa in previous centuries. Now it might well be an office, he thought, as an official in a grey smock came out and guided him along the asphalt alley between two rows of trees, and beyond the trees there was a grassy meadow with tiny flowers.

The room where they brought him had six beds, all of them empty but his under the white coverlets.

That’s how his lying-in began, interrupted in the morning by the nurse who placed his soup on the metal surface of the white nightstand and in the evening by a nurse who brought a thermometer. And by an old and angular doctor, who seemed pleasant enough. She understood that he had no wish to speak; when she left, he felt grateful that she performed her duties so quickly. No, he wasn’t sleepy. But he wanted to have his eyes closed and think of nothing. To not see or answer anyone. Three beds were arranged against the opposite wall, and three on this side; he lay on the middle one so as not to be too close to the window or too far from it. He could remember no other time when he had lain alone like this, and the lack of comparable images aroused a faint sensation of abandonment. He belonged nowhere. Despite his constant presence of mind, the world of the camps was like a distant, endless, foggy plain; the old human world was likewise remote and closed to him. From time to time, his awareness of his complete solitude was overwhelmed by his certainty about the irredeemable destruction and ultimate loss of everything – but even these visions of cosmic death had lost their terror in his exhausted body. It was as if this background of universal emptiness succeeded only in increasing his weariness and wrapping him in a noiseless and eternal calm.

He was troubled only by the thought that he might be moved from this room after the examination, but that would not happen today and probably not tomorrow either. If he had the whole night and day tomorrow, he thought he might be able to concentrate and put his thoughts in order and find some common thread in them. But at the same time he knew that he must not want even the one night or the day that would follow; such denial had been part of his subconscious defence in a lost world, almost from the instant the line of cattle cars carried him from the railway station in Trieste and he lay down on the floor and bent his legs in order to cover himself with his jacket. How distant that seemed now! And yet he still remembered how he hoped that the felt of his thick black jacket would somehow give way and make room for him. He had already concluded that his body could get no smaller, no more compact, and in the end his legs slowly changed into deadened stumps and their woodenness migrated upward, little by little. His thoughts seemed to stop at his ankles and the soles of his feet, and he felt less threatened when he realized, vividly, that the entire length of his body could fit on the floor of the cattle car. He thought of that train car now and the snowy landscape it travelled through, and how everything lay upon it differently. The cold, for example, did not just come through the slats but permeated the steel and wooden walls of the car. The wheels which struck the joints were also frozen. The steel rails of the car were horizontal carriers of cold, and the chill of the metal spread its poison through the baneful atmosphere. Thus the bodies squatting and lying in the heavy carriages soon became objects that showed almost no sign of life. He directed his thoughts inward again, limited them to his own body, hid them deep in its interior, and retreated as much as possible from the tips of his limbs, which might come into contact with the cold breath coming off the Bavarian snow. Outside it was night; they had long since left the station where an electric bell rang at regular intervals, eternally announcing the new arrival of steaming locomotives. The voices asking the names of the passing stations had grown silent. The darkness sucked up the occasional stifled curse. The tiny embers that now and then illuminated the car like a chain of connected sparks had gone out; yet it was as if he could still see them long after they faded to black. For a while, they had seemed like the visible accompaniment to some warm source he still felt inside of him and Mija’s image appeared beside them. The cigarettes she had given him still evoked a memory of warmth in the freezing train car. His supply had slowly diminished, but a certain satisfaction still gathered in them like a cloud of warm steam, the feeling that, from a great distance, Mija held her palm over their frozen darkness. He felt a wave of warmth at the touch of her palm on his chest. It was sweet, was part of the love ritual, and was also a maternal gesture extended to a threatened male creature. He gave in to her gentleness, and used her palm as a miraculous shield held against the cold night; though he was beset by the desolate atmosphere, her nearness kept him connected to a source of life, hidden somewhere in the bosom of the earth at home. But he gradually renounced his thoughts of Mija because he was afraid her image might shatter in the cold if he didn’t protect it. He would rather submerge her deep inside of him, an unheard presence beating like a second heart beside his own, a less audible heart but also less vulnerable than his. Doubts about her fate at the hands of the Gestapo were slowly surfacing within him, and now the intractability of her problems mingled with the aimlessness of his current journey. A black darkness had gathered first above their love and now above their bodies and souls like a destructive draught of ruinous breath. And so with even greater decisiveness he banished Mija from his conscious thoughts to protect her from the paralysis creeping upward from the steel-hard mallets of his legs. He deliberately shifted his mind to a time before Mija, to the balmy climate of Lake Garda, though even this was no match for the winter of this German landscape, even less so with snowy peaks appearing above the tousled surface of the water. So he sent his thoughts further down the Italian boot and jumped from the shores of Sicily to the Libyan sands. He imagined the plains of El Garia, the yellow dust, the stone fortress below which the Tunisian deserts rested in the valley. And he remembered how carefully he had to open his dry lips so as not to crack the rosy skin. Heat and wind had transformed his mouth into a scabrous scar; when he wet it with a bit of tepid water, the wind bit even deeper. A litre of water a day. It was good for them, of course, that France had just surrendered and they would soon be gone from this place. They erected their tents under the palms not far from shore. The sand, golden and hot, burned as if a bread oven lay buried beneath it. When the afternoon fire pressed on their tents and wild steam rose from the sandy sea, they plunged their bodies into the swollen layers of the Mediterranean water and delivered themselves from the flames of the Sahara. Now, in this steel carriage, he felt for a moment the soles of his feet buried in that desert sand, small silky grains moving through his hard frozen toes. And in the same instant he saw the polenta his mother used to fry in a pan when he was a boy, and how she would shake it into a bag and place it on his frostbite. But that vision faded too, and he felt his limbs in a praying position beneath his jacket, as if they were completely naked. He forced himself back into the desert tent, and tried to read the contents of Verenka’s letter, tried to see the postcards his three comrades had pinned to the tent’s canvas above their heads. And yet the hardening stumps at the ends of his twisted body kept worrying him, and he had the impression that they were pulling him downward, that they would soon break through the wooden floor of the car, escape the metal wheels of the train, the steel rails. He tried to make himself even smaller, all the while wondering if he should take the woollen shirt from his suitcase and wrap it around the soles of his feet. But that idea seemed like a sacrilege because of the caring hands that had lovingly folded the well-chosen garments. He would rather try to withstand an even sharper attack of cold than to plunder those sacred objects. This voyage, after all, had to end somewhere. The second morning after his departure from the station in Trieste would soon be dawning. And, in fact, the convoy did stop in the morning gloom on the track, where there was a fork in the middle of a lonely landscape. There they walked through the snow and the voices of predatory birds could be heard, angrier than above the streets of Trieste. All the same, the travellers took a certain comfort in not being paralysed anymore, in walking again. True, they moved like invalids walking on wooden replacements from the knees down, but physical movement showed a trace of life nonetheless. Their suitcases and bundles lent the procession a fleeting feeling that they were pilgrims seeking shelter and refuge. Only here and there in the line did someone walk without luggage, with only his hands in his pockets, like an unfortunate soul who had been captured far from home. This, indeed, was the true condition of every one of them, lost as they were in a barren tundra, above which spread the cruel frozen wings of startled birds of prey.

He tried to banish these thoughts; yet at the same time, he felt as though they were what composed him, and that he would like to lie down in them, be lost in them.

The days were indistinguishable one from the next; lying in bed had become a half-conscious, half-narcotic constancy. Each day the papers carried news of Trieste, but the euphoria he had felt when he learned from a barber in Lille about the liberation of the city had faded now. It was like the end of a kind of utopia, especially when he heard that the fate of Trieste depended entirely on the relations between the western and eastern worlds. The headlines and maps that accompanied the news report all emphasized the fact that this was one of the biggest trouble spots in the world and could actually prevent the establishment of true peace. Despite the crematoria, a deeper wisdom had not matured in the new leaders; they still engaged in the traditional competition for power and spheres of influence, forgetting all about the piles of European ashes. Such was the conflict centred on his city, which was now providing tangible evidence that any dreams about the rebirth of humankind had been folly. His knowledge of Mija’s tragic end now merged with the news about his city to create a reality of irredeemable loss. Everything seemed so distant to him; it was like seeing in a blurred reflection a landscape and a people to which he could never return, as if he had lost all trace of them.

Mija.

Now she was in him like the world from which he had just returned – a real world, but one that was sinking to the bottom and would only reappear when he no longer needed it. Its reality was sinking, but only so it could rise up again when he cherished it less. It was the same with Mija. She resided in him as absence, as emptiness, an abyss in which there lurked the source of his irrational endurance, his instinct for hope. Time and again, he was struck by the memory of her prophecy that fate would be kind to him but not to her; and his knowledge of her final departure always combined with the realization that her end had somehow managed, like sulphuric acid, to erode his very essence, that his insides were now stripped bare, like horizontal plates of lead with no humus left on them. All possible riches had disappeared together with his weakness and deficiency. And Mija was the gift he lost in those seismic days, the days before he was found.

Now and then, when he sensed the human world slowly approaching him, he felt Mija beside him. Especially in the middle of June, when he no longer lay under the sheets during the day but on top on the made bed, covered to his waist by the white coverlet. Or now, stretching out on a chaise longue on the terrace by the entrance to the clinic. At such times, Mija quietly joined him and smiled at how the old woman doctor grumbled to herself when she was alone, her heels clicking on the floor of the corridor, or how she would suddenly, right in the middle of radiography, ask a question in her harsh voice: “Avez-vous des allumettes, Monsieur Suban?” Of course, she would address him like that when he was lying in bed in his room or on the canvas chaise longue on the terrace, although from his bed he could not see the glass vessels and tubes of the pneumothorax apparatus, or the sheet of milky glass on which the radiograph rested. It was nicer, in any case, to be stretched out on the chaise longue on the terrace because the branches of a magnificent chestnut tree reached almost to the iron railing, and also because the terrace was only as wide as one and a half lounge chairs and the upper terrace was above it, so it felt as if he were lying in a narrow room surrounded by greenery. If only the doors weren’t always partly open, always left ajar, so he could hear her crackly voice addressing the patients. She was harsh even in a festive spirit. It was as if she wanted to prove to the sick officers that she was their commander now. At the same time, she couldn’t wait for them to talk back to her so she could get upset, and hardly a moment passed when she wasn’t inquiring for gossip among the patients. She was nervous and breathless; she must have been very beautiful when she was young. Her body in the white apron was shapely and full; when seen from the back, with no view of her wrinkled face, her figure and her legs were more like those of a thirty-year-old woman than of one sixty years old. True, there was her grey hair, but it was thick and lustrous and gave an impression of luxuriance rather than age.

With Mija’s eyes he observed the old doctor who didn’t want to be called madame. She made the point that she was a doctor, and therefore not male or female but sexless. And yet her very resistance to being called madame proved that she would have preferred to be of the male sex. She didn’t want to be called madame, but doctor. With her erect posture and grey hair, she was quite similar to Leif, although Leif had been taller and had had whiter hair. Despite the stethoscope that hung around his neck, when Leif in his striped prison jacket walked down the camp staircase in Natzweiler, he looked more like a Norwegian sea captain than a doctor. Though erect and dignified, he nevertheless belonged with the deportees, and had two big red letters written on his back: NN – Nacht und Nebel. Night and Fog. Which meant that, for him, death was like a path through night and fog, a path that ended in the smoke of the crematorium chimney.

He lay in the soft warmth and wondered when all these images would become mere symbols; he felt that the past must wither away, but he also wondered what meaning the future could hold with such a past. The only solution, in fact, would be to vaccinate children against bloodlust in the same way they were vaccinated against smallpox and diphtheria. And it would have to be done right away, at birth probably, with an injection straight into the heart, just as they had done to Leif.