brightness faded you could see Singing Loni’s trembling goiter and the heavy eyes of Konrad Fonn the accordionist, always staring off to where there was nothing and nobody.
There was something bestial in the way Konrad Fonn pulled the ribs of the accordion apart and squeezed them together. His drooping eyelids hinted at a lascivious nature, but his eyes were too hollow and cold for that. The music didn’t enter his soul—he just shooed the songs away, and they crawled into us. His accordion shuffled along, hollow and dull. Ever since Zither Lommer had supposedly boarded a ship in Odessa, to head somewhere in the direction of home, the orchestra was missing its warm bright tones. Maybe the accordion was as out of tune as the musician, maybe it questioned whether deportees pairing off and swaying on the Appellplatz like bushes really counted as dancing.
Kati Sentry was sitting on the bench, swinging her feet in time to the music. If a man asked her to dance she would run off into the darkness. Now and then she danced with one of the women, craning her neck and gazing at the sky. She must have danced often in the past since she was able to follow changes of rhythm. When she sat on the bench she would throw pebbles if she saw the couples come too close together. It wasn’t a game, either, her face remained serious. Albert Gion told me that most people forget all about the Appellplatz on those nights, that they go so far as to say they’re dancing on the plaza. He also told me he was never going to dance with Zirri Wandschneider again, she was clinging to him like a leech and hell-bent on giving herself to him. Besides, it wasn’t him, it was the music doing the seducing, here in the darkness, he told me. During the winter Paloma, emotions stayed pleated like the ribs of the accordion, and locked up in the mess hall. The summer dance stirred up carelessness and spread it over our melancholy like hay. The barrack windows shimmered weakly, people felt rather than saw one another. Trudi Pelikan was of the opinion that homesickness trickled from the head to the belly when we were outside on the plaza. She saw the patterns of the couples shifting from one hour to the next—homesickness in pairs, was how she put it.
I think the mixture of goodwill and guile that these couplings revealed was probably as varied and possibly as wretched as the different mixes of coal. You couldn’t mix what wasn’t there. You had to mix what you had. And I had to keep out of all the mixes and make sure no one had any idea why.
The accordion player probably sensed why, there was something disdainful in his manner. I felt hurt even if I did find him repulsive. I couldn’t resist looking at his face each time the glow from the factory lit up the sky and for as long as the light lasted. Every quarter hour I saw his neck above the accordion and his doglike head and his frightening eyes, white and stony, staring off to the side. Then the sky was black night once again. And I waited a quarter hour until the dog’s head reappeared, as ugly as before. The summer Paloma on the Appellplatz always went like that. Only once did something different happen.
It was late September, on one of our last dance nights outside. I was sitting the way I so often did, with my feet on the wooden bench and both knees tucked under my chin. Paul Gast the lawyer took a break from the dancing and sat down next to my feet and said nothing. Perhaps he really did think about his dead wife Heidrun Gast every now and then. Because the moment he leaned back, a star fell over the Russian village. He said:
Leo, you have to wish for something, fast.
The Russian village swallowed the falling star, and all the others glittered like coarse salt.
I couldn’t think of anything, he said, how about you.
I said: That we’ll come out alive.
That was a lie, spread as carelessly as hay. I had wished that my ersatz-brother was no longer alive. I wanted to hurt my mother. After all, I didn’t even know him.
On camp happiness
Happiness is something sudden.
I know mouth happiness and head happiness.
Mouth happiness comes with eating and is shorter than your mouth, even shorter than the word mouth. It doesn’t even