Fatelessness - By Imre Kertesz Page 0,47

and for whose sake “he had to be strong,” since they were waiting for him: his wife and two children—that, roughly speaking, is about all I could make out, the gist of it. So anyway, his only main concern, even here, was basically the same as it had been at the customs post, on the train, or in the brickyard: the length of the days. They now started very early indeed, just a fraction after the midsummer sunrise. That is also when I learned how cold the mornings were at Auschwitz; pressed close together to warm one another up, the boys and I would huddle by the side of our barracks opposite the barbed-wire fence, facing the still obliquely lying, ruddy sun. A few hours later, however, we would rather have been seeking some shade. In any event, time passed here too; “Leatherware” was with us here too, and the occasional joke would be cracked; here too, if not horseshoe nails, there were bits of gravel for “Fancyman” to win from us time after time; here too “Rosie” would speak up every now and then: “Now let’s have it in Japanese!” Apart from that, two trips a day to the latrines, in the morning coupled with that to the washroom barracks (a similar place, the sole difference being that instead of the platforms down its length there were three lines of zinc-lined troughs, with a parallel iron pipe fitted over each, through the tiny, closely set holes in which the water trickled), the issuing of rations, roll call in the evening, and not forgetting, of course, the bits of news—I had to make do with that; that was a day’s agenda. Added to that were events such as a “Blocksperre,” or “confinement to barracks,” on the second evening—the first time I saw our chief looking impatient, indeed I might even say irritated— with the distant sounds, an entire jumble of sounds, that filtered across at that time, in which, if one listened very hard in the somewhat stifling darkness of the barracks, one might imagine one could pick out a shriek, a dog barking, and the cracks of shots; or again the spectacle, again from behind the barbed-wire fence, of a procession of those returning from work so it was said, and I had to believe them, because that is how I too saw it, that lying on the makeshift stretchers being dragged over there by the returnees in the rear, those really were dead people, as those around me asserted. For a while, all this constantly gave plenty of work for my imagination, naturally, but not enough, I can affirm, to fill an entire long and inactive day. That is in part how I came to realize: even in Auschwitz, it seems, it is possible to be bored—assuming one is privileged. We hung around and waited in actual fact, if I think about it, for nothing to happen. That boredom, together with that strange anticipation: I think that is the impression, approximately, yes, that is in reality what may truly denote Auschwitz—purely in my eyes, of course.

Something else I have to admit: the next day I ate the soup, and by the third day was even looking forward to it. The meal system in Auschwitz, I have to say, was most peculiar. At the crack of dawn, a liquid of some kind—coffee they called it—would arrive quite soon. Lunch—soup, that is to say—was dished out astonishingly early, around nine o’clock. After that, though, there was nothing at all in this regard right up to the bread and margarine that came at dusk, before Appell; consequently, by the third day I had already struck up a rather close acquaintance with the tormenting sensation of being hungry, and the others all complained about it too. Only “Smoker” made the observation that the sensation was nothing new to him, it was more the cigarettes that he missed, and there was yet another expression on his face, besides his customary laconic air—almost a sense of satisfaction, which was rather irritating at the time, and this, I think, is why the boys dismissed it so quickly.

Amazing as it seemed when I tallied it up afterward, the truth is that I actually spent only three whole days in Auschwitz. By the evening of the fourth day I was again sitting in a train, in one of those by now familiar freight cars. The destination, so we were informed, was “Buchenwald,” and although I was somewhat