Ah, the vision of those last few meters, culminating in that embrace, how often had I gazed upon it in my dreams! That day, when I opened the door, my door, the door to my house, my body was trembling and my heart was pounding as though about to burst through my chest. I couldn’t catch my breath, and I even thought for a moment that I was going to die there, that I was going to step over the threshold and die from too much happiness. But suddenly the face of the Zeilenesseniss appeared to me, and my happiness stiffened and froze. It was a little as though someone had shoved a big handful of snow between my shirt and my naked skin. But why, at that precise moment, did that woman’s face come floating up out of limbo and dancing before my eyes?
In the last weeks of the war, the camp became an even stranger place than it had been before. Unceasing, contradictory rumors shook it like windy blasts, alternately hot and cold. Some recent arrivals murmured that the conflict was nearing its end and that we, who walked bowed down and looked like corpses, were on the winning side. This news restored to our eyes, the eyes of the living dead we had become, a gleam long since extinguished, but the fragile light couldn’t last. The guards let their confusion show for a few seconds before they quickly and brutally dispelled it: apparently determined to affirm that they were still the masters, they attacked the first one of us they got their hands on, kicking him, beating him with truncheons and rifle butts, and driving him down into the mud as though trying to make him disappear. Nevertheless, their nervousness and the constantly worried expressions on their faces led us to conclude that something big really was happening.
The guard who was my master stopped paying much attention to me. Whereas every day for weeks on end he’d amused himself by putting a leather collar around my neck, attaching a braided leash to it, and parading me around the camp — me walking on all fours, and him following behind, upright on his two legs and his certitudes — now I never saw him anymore except at mealtime. He came furtively to the kennel that served as my bed and poured two ladles of soup into my bowl, but I could tell that this game no longer amused him. His face had become gray, and two deep wrinkles I’d never seen before now furrowed his forehead.
I knew that he’d been an accountant before the war and that he had a wife, three children — two boys and a girl — and a cat, but no dog. He was an innocuous-looking fellow with a timid manner, shifty eyes, and small, well-groomed hands, which he washed methodically several times a day while whistling a military tune. Unlike a great many of his colleagues, he didn’t drink and never visited the windowless huts where female prisoners (whom we never laid an eye on) were made available to the guards. He was a pale, reserved, ordinary man, who always spoke in an even tone, never raising his voice, but who had twice, before my eyes and without a second’s hesitation, bludgeoned prisoners to death for forgetting to salute him by lifting their caps. His name was Joss Scheidegger. I’ve tried hard to banish that name from my memory, but the memory doesn’t take orders. The best you can hope for is to deaden it a bit from time to time.
One morning, there was a great deal of commotion in the camp: noises of every sort, shouted orders, questions. The guards scuttled about in all directions, gathering their kits together, loading multifarious objects onto carts. There was a new smell in the air, a sour, pregnant odor that surpassed the stench emanating from our poor bodies: fear had changed sides.
In their great agitation, the guards ignored us completely. Before, we had existed for them as slaves, but that morning, we no longer existed at all.
I was lying in the kennel, keeping warm among the mastiffs and watching the curious spectacle of our keepers preparing to make a rapid exit. I followed each movement. I heard each call and every order, none of which concerned us anymore. At one point, when the majority of the guards had already abandoned the premises, I saw Scheidegger heading for the hut near the kennels where the offices of the prison census authority were located. He stayed briefly in the hut and emerged with a leather pouch, which seemed to contain documents. One of the dogs saw him and barked. Scheidegger looked toward the kennel and stopped. He appeared to hesitate, darting glances all around, and having determined that no one was watching, he walked quickly to my kennel, knelt on the ground beside me, dug in his pocket, took out a little key with which I was quite familiar, and with shaky hands opened the lock on my collar; then, not knowing what to do with the key, he suddenly threw it down as if it were burning his fingers. “Who’s going to pay for all this?”
It was a shabby, undignified question — an accountant’s question — and as Scheidegger asked it, he looked me in the eye for the first time, perhaps expecting me to give him an answer. His forehead was covered with sweat and his skin even grayer than usual. What was the meaning of his query? Was he hoping for forgiveness? From me? He stared at me for several seconds, imploringly, fearfully. Then I started to bark. My barking was prolonged, lugubrious, melancholy, instantly echoed and extended by the two mastiffs. Scheidegger, terrified, bounded to his feet and ran away.
Within a little less than an hour, there wasn’t a guard left in the camp. Silence reigned. Nothing could be heard, and no one could be seen. Then, timidly, one by one, shadows began to step out of the huts, not yet daring to take a real look around, and not saying a word. An unsteady, incredulous army, hesitating figures with sallow skin and hollow cheeks, began to fill the streets of the camp. Soon the former prisoners formed a compact, fragile crowd, still silent, which took the measure of its new circumstances by drifting aimlessly from one place to another, dazzled by the freedom none of them dared name.
When this great tide of suffering flesh and bones turned the corner and moved toward the group of huts that housed the guards and their commanders, something incredible happened. Those in front raised their hands, without a word, and everyone stopped short as though frozen in place. Yes, it was an incredible sight: standing alone, facing hundreds of creatures that were gradually becoming men again, was the Zeilenesseniss. Completely alone. Immensely alone.
I don’t believe in fate. And I no longer believe in God. I don’t believe in anything anymore. But I must admit that there seemed to be more than mere chance in that meeting between a throng of people in extreme misery and the person who was the living symbol of their tormentors.
Why was she still there, when all the guards had left? She too must have left, and then she’d come back, no doubt in haste, to fetch something she’d forgotten. The first thing we heard was her voice. Her ordinary voice, sure of itself, enlivened by her sense of her power and her privileges; the voice of superiority, which sometimes gave the order to hang one of us and sometimes sang nursery rhymes to her child.
I didn’t understand what she said — I was standing rather far from her — but I could tell that she was speaking as though nothing had changed. I’m sure she didn’t know she was alone in the camp; she didn’t know she’d been abandoned. I’m sure she thought there were still guards on hand, ready to execute the least of her orders and to beat us to death if she desired them to do so. But no one answered her call. No one came to her side to serve her or aid her. No one in the crowd facing her made a move. She kept on talking, but little by little, her voice changed. The words came faster and faster at the same time as their intensity decreased; then her voice exploded and became a howl before fading away again.
Today, I imagine her eyes. I imagine the eyes of the Zeilenesseniss when she began to realize that she was the last of them, that she was alone, and that perhaps — yes, perhaps — she would never leave the camp, that for her, too, it was going to be transformed into a grave.