I am.
Bigger treasures have a sign that says, Do you remember.
But the most precious treasures of all will have a sign saying, I was there.
I WAS THERE was what Tur Prikulitsch claimed should be written on treasures. My Adam’s apple bobbed up and down under my chin as though I’d swallowed my elbow. The barber said: We’re still here. That’s five coming after nine for you.
Back then in the barber room I thought that if you didn’t die in the camp then everything later would be After. That we’d be out of the camp, free, possibly even back home. Then we could say: I WAS THERE. But five comes after nine, we’ve been lucky, but our luck is a little balamuc, and we have to explain where and how. So why should someone like Tur Prikulitsch go back home and claim he never needed any luck.
Perhaps even back then someone from the camp had already decided to kill Tur Prikulitsch. Someone who was running around with the hunger angel while Tur Prikulitsch was strutting in his shiny patent-leather purselike shoes. Perhaps during the skinandbones time someone standing at roll call or locked up inside in the concrete box was rehearsing how he might split Tur Prikulitsch’s forehead in two. Or was this someone up to his neck in snow beside a train embankment or up to his neck in coal at the yama or in sand at the kar’yer or inside the cement tower. Or did he swear revenge when he was lying on his bunk, unable to sleep in the yellow light of the barrack. Maybe he planned the murder on the day that Tur, with his oily gaze, was at the barber’s, talking about treasures. Or at the moment when he asked me in the mirror, so how are things in the cellar. Or at the very instant I was saying: Cozy, every shift is a work of art. I guess a murder with a tie in the mouth and an axe on the stomach is also a work of art, a belated one.
By now I’ve realized that what’s written on my treasures is THERE I STAY. That the camp let me go home only to create the space it needed to grow inside my head. Since I came back, my treasures no longer have a sign that says HERE I AM or one that says I WAS THERE. What’s actually written on my treasures is: THERE I’M STUCK. The camp stretches on and on, bigger and bigger, from my left temple to my right. So when I talk about what’s inside my skull I have to talk about an entire camp. I can’t protect myself by keeping silent and I can’t protect myself by talking. I exaggerate in one case just as I do in the other, but I WAS THERE doesn’t fit in either. And there’s no way of getting it right.
But there are treasures, Tur Prikulitsch was correct about that. The fact that I came back is a stroke of crippled luck that’s permanently grateful, a survival top that starts spinning at the least damned thing. It has me in its grip just like all my treasures, which I cannot bear but also can’t let go of. I’ve been using them now for over sixty years. They are weak and pushy, intimate and disgusting, forgetful and vindictive, worn out and new. They are Artur Prikulitsch’s dowry and I can’t tell one from the other. When I list them, I start to stumble.
My proud inferiority.
My grumbled fear-wishes.
My reluctant haste, I jump from zero all the way to a hundred.
My defiant compliance, I acknowledge that everyone is right so I can hold it against them.
My fumbled opportunism.
My polite miserliness.
My wearied envy of yearning, of others who know what they want from life. A feeling like stiff wool, cold and frizzy.
My steep-sided hollowness, I’m all spooned out, hard-pressed on the outside and empty on the inside ever since I no longer have to go hungry.
My lateral transparency, that I fall apart by going inward.
My burdened afternoons, time moving with me in between the furniture, slowly and heavily.
My fundamental leaving in a lurch. I need much closeness, but I don’t give up control. I’m a master of the silken smile even as I shrink back. Since the hunger angel, I don’t allow anyone to possess me.
The most burdensome of my treasures is my compulsion to work. It is the reverse of forced labor, an emergency exchange. In me sits