Deviation Page 10

  Suddenly the girl with the bangs begins to tremble; she grabs François and drags him into a corner, down on the floor. In our protracted silence her senseless words seem exaggerated:

  “Know what I like? A man who takes you right there, on the floor, in the dark, with at most the glow of a candle stuck in the neck of a bottle you’ve already emptied, the melted wax sliding down the glass. You know, keeping him guessing up until the last, so he doesn’t know what you want, if you’re willing to give in to him, if it’s the right moment, tease him then discourage him when he least expects it, then tease him again until he can’t control himself any longer and wants you at all costs, and meanwhile you yourself don’t know what you’ll do, whether you’ll run off or lose yourself with him.”

  François, overcome, murmurs incomprehensibly.

  A siren’s wail rips through the air. It’s the siren at the concentration camp, reporting an escape. The girl with the bangs cries out, clings to François.

  We all leap to our feet and listen intently from behind the windows.

  The girl with the bangs rushes out from the corner, screaming, “My friend, they caught him, I feel it, I feel it!”

  “Who?”

  “He was supposed to escape from there today.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  The coal man comes running in, out of breath: “They’re coming with the dogs. Beat it, there are a lot of them.”

  Jeanine takes my hand. We creep along the barracks to the garbage dump.

  The police dogs, unleashed in the countryside, are barking—gunshots, shouts echo through the air, motorcycle engines streak across the plain.

  “Poor Jean de Lille!” Jeanine murmurs.

  “I’m scared, Jeanine, don’t leave me.”

  “Just think,” Jeanine whispers, squeezing my hand. “Yesterday I didn’t even know you yet.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “only one day has passed.”

  Rome, 1954

  PART 2

  BENEATH THE RUBBLE

  AS LONG AS THE HEAD LIVES

  I

  The bombing went on for three hours, from noon until three o’clock. That day I was sure I would die. I was trembling the whole time, huddled in a corner of the basement, holding my breath as the whistling sped toward me, until the bomb burst in my eardrums and I started trembling again: “I can’t take it anymore.”

  When it was over, I remained flattened against the wall, cringing, refusing to listen to those who were trying to pull me away, assuring me that the Flying Fortresses were gone. Finally, I let them lead me out into the open air. Rubble, dust, flames, everywhere. A bomb had even fallen on the hotel, though luckily it hadn’t crashed through to the cellar: it had stopped at the second floor. My legs wouldn’t hold me up; my whole body was shaking.

  A young Polish man who was always helping me, a deported worker, twenty years old like me, took me to a room on the first floor, where I collapsed on the bed.

  He returned shortly afterward and made me drink cognac, telling me that Mainz had been destroyed, which meant that the Americans, who for two weeks had remained at a standstill twenty kilometers from the Rhine, would enter the city at any moment. So for us the war was over.

  It was February 27, 1945.

  I sat up:

  “Johann, let’s go celebrate!”

  “No one will try to kill us anymore!”

  We drank, and I decided to tidy myself up while he went looking for our friends.

  I ran downstairs in a flash, to get my little suitcase in the basement, and I felt an energy, a joy, an urge to act. I raced back up. I washed myself thoroughly and put on clean clothes.

  Then I looked at myself standing in the wardrobe mirror: You’re really safe and sound, life is yours.

  “Never mind celebrating!” The Pole rushed in, out of breath. “Our friends ended up buried, we have to hurry.”

  I followed him reluctantly. I was worried about getting my pants dirty.

  It was already evening.

  The street was full of people, voices shouting, fires flaring up everywhere. That sight always gave me a barbarous joy, a need to rush, to take risks.

  “Behind the door on the right, in the square over there.”

  We walked briskly, holding hands, and were about to enter when a deafening roar made us jump back as the door buckled in flames. “Luzi! Johann!” our companions waiting farther on called to us. We’d been misinformed: when the shelter collapsed, they’d already been on their way out.

  “It’s not my day,” I said to Johann. “Twice now I’ve felt it.” Returning with our friends, all of them excited, asking and answering questions, I thought: what a scare!

  The house adjacent to the hotel had collapsed. In front of it a German girl begged passersby to help her rescue her parents.

  “Come on,” I said. But there were only three of us, Johann, a Belgian, and myself—four counting the German girl. The others had disappeared. I was used to it: grabbing passersby by the arm as they were taking off, I appealed to them.

  We recruited seven men. The eighth, a German soldier, resisted: “Please, I’m just back from the front today. I have three days’ leave. Let me see my children.”

  There were eleven of us altogether, two of us women.

  We moved stones and debris from one side of the collapsed house.

  We dragged a huge beam out of a heap of ruins and hoisted it on our backs.

  We climbed a ladder to a section of the first floor that was still intact, with only one wall standing behind it. We found a wooden plank, which we used to make a bridge between the first floor and an opening in the side of the hotel. In that part of the hotel water flowed from a broken pipe.

  It was six o’clock in the evening. We divided the tasks among us: from above, six of us were to ram the beam as forcefully as we could against the side of the collapsed house that we had cleared, which adjoined the shelter, to break through to those who were buried; the other five had to carry containers of water to throw on the fires burning around us to prevent the flames from entering first, once the wall was breached.

  We had to alternate every quarter of an hour, except for the German girl who had asked us for help to save her parents.

  I took turns with Johann.

  The first round it was his turn to ram the beam along with the others, the second time my turn. The third time, when he was up, he slipped on the plank and dislocated his ankle. I’d been waiting for that moment to go and get water.

  “You did that on purpose,” I told him. “And that makes three.” I caught hold of the beam again.

  Jamming down with my entire body for maximum thrust, three people in front of me and two behind, I worked with such a will that I forgot my fear.

  When we heard the concrete give way, the men carrying water jumped onto our plank to lend a helping hand with the final shove of the beam, but a cry rose from a group of spectators who had gathered in the street:

  “The wall is collapsing.”

  It wasn’t that of the adjacent house that we were trying to breach, however; it was the piece of wall left standing on the floor we were on.

  We dropped the beam.

  It happened in an instant: I just had time to glance at the wall behind me, turn my back to it, and cover my face with my arms. What a stupid way to go! I thought. That was all.

  II

  Later I only remember being trapped in the middle of a blaze and having the distinct impression of being in hell. I was suspended by my feet, upside down, my head and arms unbearably heavy, while my legs and the rest of my body drifted in the air, unwilling to come down. I saw myself surrounded by the hotel owner and my companions, and the thought that I would have to spend eternity with them was absolutely crushing.

  When I came to somewhat, I was in a compartment that bounced in the dark, my whole body in atrocious pain, and Johann’s cracked voice was saying, “Easy, easy, oh God, oh dear God.”

  Following that I remember some white
rooms in a livid light, with rows of beds from which came groans and appeals, and, though I recognized purgatory, I too wanted to sink onto one of those white beds for a moment. Instead I spent an infinite time in darkness, from which I tried vainly to escape.

  The following day I regained consciousness for a few hours.

  They told me that the wall had fallen down on us, smashing through our floor and the ground floor below us, and plunging us into a basement.

  Those saved were: a German soldier, who dropped to the floor at the base of the wall, realizing in a flash that it would fall slantwise from above; the Belgian majordomo, who had the presence of mind to jump down to the street, so that he got away with a fractured femur; and Johann, sitting astride the crack in the hotel’s wall with his dislocated ankle.

  A brick, which broke off the top of the wall, had shot out with such force that its arc sent it flying straight into the right temple of the German soldier who, standing on the sidewalk across the street, had asked them to let him see his children again: he’d slumped to the ground, killed instantly.

  Johann had immediately hopped onto the edge of the caved-in floor, on one foot only, and, amid the flames, lowered himself into the crater opened up by the wall’s collapse. Scrabbling through the rubble and discovering the other bodies, he climbed over them until he found me, picked me up, and carried me over his shoulder, steadying me with one hand while trying to find a handhold to pull himself up with the other. And it seems that while he was lifting me up, still on one foot, to get me out, I called him “Drecksack”* and struggled to free myself.

  He clambered up the burning stones and debris, but he couldn’t manage it and kept sliding back down into the inextinguishable phosphorescent flames that had been unleashed by the wall’s collapse.

  A German lieutenant who lived in the hotel had come running from the adjacent office when he heard the wall crash down, not to mention the shouting. When he learned that I had been buried and that to save me Johann had also been swallowed up, he moved a ladder over to the aperture, looked down, and called out.

  Johann lifted me up, straightening his arms, and the German grabbed me and laid me on the rubble. Without my weight, Johann managed to wriggle out.

  He tore off my burning clothes, then tore off his. Together he and the lieutenant carried me down the ladder. Here it seems that I began to cry out nonstop: “Die Füsse runter!”†

  They carried me to the hotel lobby, where everyone surrounded me. I kept screaming, “Die Füsse runter!”

  Then the German lieutenant and Johann stood me up between them, supporting me by the arms and by the waist. It appeared that I had come to and was looking around, but I soon fainted.

  They settled me on a sofa, slapped me, splashed me with vinegar. I cried, then I started murmuring, delirious, “Legs down, I beg you, legs down.”

  Lieutenant Gauli went to get a car: “I’ll take her to the hospital, as a German I can get her admitted right away. If they give me a hard time, they’ll be sorry.”

  I was known in the neighborhood for always being the first to volunteer in the Löscharbeiten, the recovery operations for those who got buried.

  He returned soon afterward at the wheel of a car. Johann sat in back with me in his arms.

  At the hospital, packed with wounded, the lieutenant insisted they put me in a bed, transferring to the floor a German in less serious condition than me.

  There I started ordering them to call God for me right away, then I asked for a mirror, and, when I saw my cracked forehead, my torn cheek and lip, smeared with blood, I said, “It’s over,” and fainted again.

  But Johann stayed by my side all night because, shrieking like a wild beast, I kept trying to jump out of bed with such force and cunning that he had to fight with me to get me to lie back down again.

  I had a compressed spinal cord, phosphorus burns all over my body (fourteen of them), a fractured skull, a dislocated right shoulder, broken ribs both front and back, on my left side, and fractured pelvis bones. But I wasn’t aware of any of it.

  Only the following day did Johann, with his foot in a plaster cast and his burns bandaged up, go with the German lieutenant and a few other men to pull the others out of the basement. Three were dead and four were dying, all of whom died while being transported, except for the German girl, who was a university physics student. A bucket had overturned onto her head, cracking her skull, and had remained jammed on her neck for twenty-four hours. They had to saw it off. But she had such vitality that she survived fourteen days more, battling death, lucid and strong-willed to the end.

  As for the people we had wanted to free from the ruins, using pickaxes and wooden supports they had dug themselves a small underground tunnel from the wall opposite ours, and had made it out to the open on their own.

  III

  I will have to continue the story by combining what I remember with what was reported to me.

  The following day I found myself in a small quiet room. Looking around, I saw two occupied beds behind me, and another one beside me. Their occupants had their faces covered by sheets.

  Convinced that I couldn’t last long, after I had horrified the patients in the ward with my screams, the doctors had stuffed me with morphine and had me transferred to room 18 on the ground floor, which served as the surgical wing’s morgue since the real one had been destroyed.

  The dead usually remained there one night and were stored in the bathroom the next day to make room for others, until the funeral van came to pick them up.

  In the first month there was such a crush of corpses that I often saw one or two of them on a stretcher right beside the bed.

  They also moved comatose patients to room 18 for the benefit of the healthier patients in the wards, since the frequent deaths caused such depression or hysteria among the latter that it affected their physical condition and made it impossible for their will to live to further assist the care they received. Of course I didn’t know these things. It seems that during the first days, as soon as my morphine wore off, I would scream mindlessly, making myself heard throughout the entire building, until, after being injected with new, increasingly large doses of the narcotic, I gradually settled into a deathlike stupor. Every morning they cleaned and medicated my extensive burns with cod liver oil salve, but I wasn’t conscious of any of this.

  I’m told that I refused to be turned over, constantly resorting to the weapon of bestial screaming, and that they had to sedate me numerous times to tend to my back, to reposition my dislocated shoulder, and to stitch up my head wound.

  I remember awakening once and involuntarily touching a body with my left hand: a hip, a belly, a thigh—in a word, flesh—that was in my bed, under my blankets; it wasn’t my flesh, and it was cold. Intrigued, I stroked and fingered the body, my hand moving upward, until I lifted the covers to peer underneath and saw with horror that the strange body belonged to me, it was mine, marmoreal and numb. I understood in a flash that I had died. But what about the pain? It must have been what it felt like to decompose, and, indeed, this body gave off a stench of rotten fish.

  So then, consciousness survives bodily death. I remember those moments perfectly, because that was when I felt the most inconceivable terror of my life.

  Had the doctors and nuns noticed that I was dead? That was the first thing to determine, if I wanted to avoid being carried away like the others and stuck in the ground, with dirt in my eyes, nostrils, and mouth.

  I could see. Which meant they hadn’t lowered my eyelids, and that was a good sign.

  Shortly afterward, two doctors came in with a nun; I widened my eyes and stared at them. I recalled certain corpses in the Lager whose open eyes seemed to be looking around and winking under their eyelashes at those moving about them.

  The doctors approached me and one said, “Never seen such endurance. But she must have suffered a brain injury, there’s something abnormal about her gaze.”

  I listened.

  Another nun had entered. �
�When I’m on night duty, she scares me. I feel those eyes on me constantly.”

  As long as they don’t check my heart, I thought, in the paroxysmal joy of having gotten away with it.

  “I wonder if she was baptized!” the first nun sighed. “Perhaps her soul is waiting for the sacraments so it can depart in peace. How could I not have thought of it? I’ll have them give her Extreme Unction.”

  I thought of trying to utter a few words. My lips moved: “Ich muss nicht sterben”* came out in a croak.

  They looked at me, disconcerted. So then, with concentration and perseverance, I could perhaps bring my body back to life bit by bit. In my exhilaration I gurgled my delight.

  “Let’s go,” said a doctor, twisting his mouth. “What a pity, so young.”

  As I said, I don’t remember any of this.

  It seems the priest approached me several times in the following days but as soon as I saw him, I screamed as though possessed; so he backed away, uncertain as to whether I might have grave mortal sins on my soul. They called me das schwarze Teufelchen, the little black devil. I have no recollection of it.

  I do remember that once, seeing the priest arrive, I said to God, “What more do you want from me? After all you’ve done to me.”

  I let the priest think that I wanted to confess, that he should wait a moment. He must have notified the nuns, who came running excitedly, giving thanks to heaven; they arranged a small altar, then withdrew.

  Speaking slowly and savoring my words, I pretended that I was Dutch, and recited imaginary lapses and sins. Then, satisfied with my vengeance, I recited the Act of Contrition.

  Johann came to see me at all hours, and I’m told I always whispered that he should go rob someone because I needed a great deal of money.

  For fifteen days I didn’t put anything in my mouth, I rejected every drop of tea; they said I was very skinny, my dark eyes haunted.

  Then I started drinking milk diluted with warm water that Johann fed me in a baby bottle. I sucked greedily, feeling the liquid flow down my esophagus, constantly convinced that I was nursing my body back to life millimeter by millimeter through sheer willpower.