The Librarian of Auschwitz(57)
Renée still doesn’t say a word. The SS guard realizes it’s not going to be easy to gain her confidence. The girl tugs at one of her curls and pulls it down to her mouth in that movement he adores.
“Would you like me to come back and see you another day?”
She doesn’t answer. Her eyes sweep the camp’s muddy ground. He’s SS—he can do what he likes; he doesn’t have to ask her permission to speak to her. Or to do whatever he wants to do. She doesn’t say anything, but Pestek is so excited that he interprets her silence as a discreet yes.
After all, she hasn’t said no.
He smiles happily and says good-bye with an awkward wave of his hand.
“I’ll see you soon, Renée.”
She watches the SS officer walk away and stands motionless for a long time, perplexed. Silver cogs, springs, and golden splinters are left in the mud.
*
It’s not easy for Dita. Her father’s absence weighs unbearably on her. How can something that no longer exists be so heavy? How can emptiness have weight?
She could barely get down from her bunk this morning. She did it so slowly that she infuriated her bad-tempered bunkmate, who started to swear in the filthiest language Dita had ever heard. At any other time, Dita would have been terrified by the old woman’s fury, but she didn’t even have the energy to be frightened. She turned her head and fixed the woman with a stare of such indifference that, to her surprise, the woman stopped swearing and didn’t say another word until Dita had finished her slow descent.
Following the afternoon roll call and the order to fall out, the children from Block 31 noisily march off either to play or go and meet their parents. In a vegetative state, Dita slowly begins to gather together her books, and drags herself over to the Block?ltester’s cubicle to hide them. Fredy is going through some packages.
“I was keeping something for you, for when you have to carry out repairs on your books,” says Hirsch.
He holds out a pair of cute blue scissors with rounded ends—the sort young schoolkids use. It can’t have been easy for him to get his hands on such an exceptional item in the Lager. And he leaves immediately to avoid hearing her thanks.
Dita decides to take advantage of the scissors to cut some stray threads off the old Czech book. She’d rather stay and do any task in Block 31. She knows that Mrs. Turnovská and a few acquaintances from Terezín are keeping her mother company, and she doesn’t feel like seeing anyone. She stows all the books in the hidey-hole except for the dilapidated novel, and then retrieves a little velvet bag tied with string in which she keeps her librarian’s small first-aid kit. The bag used to hold a whole potato, the prize in a heavily contested crossword puzzle competition. Dita occasionally lifts the bag to her nose and inhales the marvelous smell of that potato.
She goes over to the corner where the hidey-hole is and painstakingly applies herself to her task. First, she cuts off all the dangling threads with her scissors. Then, as if she were suturing an open wound, she uses a rudimentary needle and thread to resew some pages that are on the verge of coming loose. The result isn’t beautiful, but the pages are now firmly held together. She also applies strips of tape to the torn pages, and the book stops looking like something that’s going to fall apart imminently.
She wants to escape from the loathsome reality of the camp that has killed her father. A book is like a trapdoor that leads to a secret attic: You can open it and go inside. And your world is different.
She hesitates briefly, wondering whether she should or shouldn’t read this book with its missing pages, which according to Hirsch, is unsuitable for young ladies and bears the title The Adventures of the Good Soldier ?vejk. But her hesitation lasts less time than her midday bowl of soup. After all, who says she wants to be a young lady? And anyway, she’d rather be a research scientist investigating microbes or an airline pilot than a prissy young thing who wears frilly dresses and white ribbed stockings.
Jaroslav Ha?ek, the author of the book, sets the action in Prague during the Great War and describes the protagonist as a chubby chatterbox who, having already escaped once from joining the army—“exempted because of stupidity”—is drafted again. He arrives at the recruitment office in a wheelchair, supposedly suffering from arthritis in the knees. He’s a rogue who’s keen to eat all the food and drink all the liquor he can lay his hands on, and work as little as possible. His name is ?vejk, and he earns a living by catching stray dogs and selling them as if they were purebreds. He speaks very politely to everyone, and his gestures and friendly gaze are always kindly. Whenever he’s asked for something, he usually has some anecdote or story to illustrate the matter, although frequently it has no bearing on the case and no one has asked to hear it. And everyone is puzzled by the fact that whenever somebody attacks him or yells at him or insults him, he doesn’t answer back, but agrees with them. In this way, he convinces them he’s a complete idiot and they let him be.
“You’re a complete nitwit!”
“Yes, sir, what you’re saying is absolutely true,” ?vejk replies in his meekest tone.
Dita misses Dr. Manson, whom she had accompanied in her reading through the mining towns of the Welsh mountains, and even Hans Castorp, calmly stretched out on his chaise longue facing the Alps. This book insists on tying her to Bohemia and to war. Her eyes skim over the pages, and she can’t quite understand what this Czech author wants to say to her. A furious officer reprimands the soldier-protagonist, a poor potbellied, shabbily dressed soul who’s a bit of a fool. She doesn’t like it; the situation is almost decadent. She likes books that enlarge life, not the ones that belittle it.