Rabbi Ben-David and I hugged each other and wept for a while—two shadows that had once been men, in hanging rags that had once been clothes, and behind the brick tower one little American soldier was throwing up—back home in Oklahoma he hadn’t seen such heaps of semi-burnt and still smoking human corpses. Probably at the same time somewhere in Treblinka, Auschwitz, or Maidanek, little Soviet soldiers were throwing up, believing along with Maxim Gorki that “human being” has a proud sound.
American nurses were walking up and down the camp, and nuns from some Samaritan order were carrying the dying on stretchers, here and there arrested SS men were being taken away, movie cameras were buzzing and photo cameras were clicking.
One American major solemnly ascended his tank to announce something to us, probably important and epic, or so it appeared, but I didn’t hear him—a cold darkness crawled into my brain and I collapsed on the ground. That’s the way it goes. Human perseverance is a great mystery and it’s not hidden in biological laws governing the cell, just the opposite, it completely opposes them and submits to completely different, immaterial, metaphysical qualities of the soul, or, as the rabbi would say, its stubbornness. I have heard about people sick with incurable diseases, for example malaria or fainting, who in the face of formidable physical or emotional strain and despite the extreme exhaustion of their organism, have not even once been visited by the otherwise periodic, clockwork-like symptoms of their disability. But on the first day, when the gates of the camp or the prison remain behind their backs, people have collapsed and everything has started up all over again—as if the disease, mercifully gone on temporary leave, energetically spits on its palms and gets back to work again. Then follows the first seizure in years, or the malaria with the exotic name of “terziana” remembers that it hasn’t tormented you for a long time with its fevers that are so high and so pedantically regular, like the ocean’s high and low tides, that you could fry an egg on your palm. So much then for the stubbornness of the soul. I’ll come back to it later.
I opened my eyes and looked around, without moving my head, and found myself in some kind of a yellow cloud. Light was beaming literally from everywhere and this light was making everything hurt—my eyeballs, every fiber, every little atom of my body. I tried to lift my arm, in order to block out this yellow luminescence, but it was immobile and heavy as lead.
Then I saw myself—you won’t believe it, but I swear that’s how it was—from the height of the square brick tower, below which the body of Sturmführer Zukerl had earlier been dangling from a piece of electric cord (but how much earlier—yesterday, last year, last century?) and I also saw myself lying on a folding bed in the huge yellow-orange medical tent with the two red crosses on it. How I could simultaneously be up there at the tower, and see myself from Zukerl’s point of view inside the tent, I don’t know, but that’s how it was—I could see my arm, immobile and heavy, because it was tied with a strap to the folding bed, and drop by drop, through the transparent little tube inside its veins, flowed something glistening and yellowish—maybe from the yellow light, streaming in from everywhere, or maybe this was the color of life, I don’t know.
Only when things began to take on realistic outlines and I managed to move my head did I come down from the tower and see Rabbi Ben-David, sitting on a folding chair, his eyes fixed on me with a worried look. “How are you?” he asked.
I moved, very slightly, my cracked lips—a sign that I heard him, that I was there, that I was alive, but even so much as a squeak I couldn’t produce. The rabbi dipped a small handkerchief in the aluminum mug and wet my lips with it, and then my forehead too, burning with fever. I reached out with my free palm and placed it on his knee, clothed in ragged duck trousers. I did it perhaps in search of security and support, and he, my rabbi, stroked my hand. After that I again sank into darkness, bottomless and endless.
Time again lost its dimensions, I don’t remember how many times I observed myself from the top of the brick tower and then again came down to the tent, to my body. My thoughts, shredded to rags, slid down the surface of my consciousness as if it were a smooth glacier and none of them could catch hold of anything, any kind of small jagged bump, to avoid sinking deeper down, into the darkness. But I still managed to crawl up stubbornly to one single thought, because I needed the answer: Was I alive? And why was I at the same time both up at the tower at Zukerl’s wire, and down in the tent? From my height I was dispassionately observing the doctor, who in his white coat over his military uniform was listening to my heart and lungs, or my rabbi, who was trying to thrust a spoonful of broth through my spasmodically clenched teeth. I was sliding down the glacier, naturally it was cold, my whole body was shivering in spite of the clear sensation that I was sweating profusely.
One night, during a blinding full moon, I was sitting up at the tower, and right below me Zukerl was swaying in the breeze, whistling some tune from The Merry Widow. On such cloudless nights the Anglo-Americans don’t fly, the moon was up there staring, and I was feeling light and immaterial, calm and good. I didn’t notice when my former sergeant major sat down quietly beside me, loosened the noose around his neck, patted me on the shoulder in a friendly way, and said:
“But do you know why I love you? Because you’re a dirty Jewish bastard!”
I gave out a laugh, happily: “That’s what I am all right!”
“And now the two of us, are we dead?”
“Of course,” I answered, still so happily.
“It’s good to be dead,” dreamily said Zukerl.
“Very much so, Mister Sergeant Major.”
“Sturmführer!”
“I mean to say it’s wonderful to be dead, Mister Sturmführer. You and I saw a lot of death, we were transporting death, burning death with gasoline, and burying it. Now it’s our turn and I think it’s fair.”
“Naturally,” Zukerl agreed readily. “As they say, ‘To each, his own,’ isn’t that so?”
It was a nice, quiet night, but I had to excuse myself to Zukerl and go down to my body, because they were sticking in my behind some of those nasty and painful needles, after which a wave of heat ran through my spine all the way to my brain, and made me wake up and vomit some bitter green stuff.
I opened my eyes and whispered “water.” This apparently was the end of both my painful crawling along the slippery ice, and my sweet nights on top of the tower in the company of the swaying Zukerl. I looked around surprised and saw above me the blurry face of Rabbi Ben-David.
“Am I alive?” I asked with difficulty.
“Probably,” said the rabbi, “because the dead don’t ask stupid questions.”
“But I was dead,” I said.
“Almost. But not completely.”
“I think completely. Because my soul had left my body and was observing everything from above, from the top of the tower, with the hanged Zukerl.”
The rabbi laughed quietly, “And what did your souls see from the top of the tower?”
“Everything. And me, and you, and the doctors. And that angel all in white, with a white halo, and a cross on the breast, who came to take me.”
“Ai-ai, Itzik, you’re dreaming Christian dreams!”
“It wasn’t a dream,” I insisted.
The rabbi tried to remember something, then asked, “And wasn’t the face of this angel completely black?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I didn’t see it.”
“Because the angels from the cotton fields of Mississippi have black faces. And yours is even called Nurse Angela, a sergeant from the medical unit.”
“Nurse Angela…. If that’s so, why have I been then simultaneously here and on top of the tower?”
“This was a dream of your soul, Itzik. Just a dream for courage. Because every mortal is in his own way vain and wants to leave something of himself behind that is eternal and unchanging—if not a pyramid, at least an immortal soul. But even the pyramids get robbed a long time before the end of eternity. After death there’s nothing left, I’m sorry to say. It’s the same with humans and with worms; both of them submit to the same conditions of life—Ecclesiastes said it. Now sleep, my boy, and stop dreaming of hanged Zukerl.”
Much later, during one of my next lucid periods, when I felt considerably better, I asked Ben-David, “When are we going back to Kolodetz?”
The rabbi was silent for awhile, apparently hesitating, then he finally said, “Itzik, you should be admitted to a hospital. Nurse Angela will take care of it. And to Kolodetz—I’ll go alone, for now.”
“Are you abandoning me?”
“We’re all bound together in a chain, the dead and the living, the innocent and the guilty, and none of the links can leave the chain. I love you, Itzik, but I have to go—I have seven times seven accounts to settle and seven times seven thousands of dead to rebury. And to learn all the truths, and utter all the curses, and say all the prayers. Otherwise what’s the meaning of all the trials we’ve endured? Stay here, I’ll let you know when and whether to come back!”
“But I have to find Sarah and the children!”
“I’ll tell you when to come back,” the rabbi stubbornly repeated, “and whether to come back. Because the fruit of futile hopes is bitterer than even the saddest truth.”
I stretched my powerless arm, took the rabbi’s hand, and squeezed it while one single, lonely, hot tear ran down my cheek.
And so, my dear brother and patient reader, some took off to the east, with the military forces, to home and hearth, all in ashes; others took off for the west, to new shores. Who was wrong and who was right? I don’t know. Right and pure remained only the dead, may God give them shelter in His boundless kingdom.