Biederer stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette, lit another. By now the room was not only hot but also hazy with smoke. The six-inch gap in the window was not letting the smoke out fast enough. He had a fuzzy cast to him, as if viewed through Vaseline. This only added to the impression that time was becoming thinner, that the past was closer. Even the taste of smoke in Aharon’s mouth could have been any smoke, even that of the ovens.
“There was this guard; Wallick was his name. He and Kobinski… it was a battle between them, a battle to the death.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because Wallick took it as a challenge to break Kobinski, that’s why—to bring him down into the dirt and horror with the rest of us pishers. If Kobinski’s saintliness intimidated Gröding, it only made him the special target of Wallick. And let me tell you—you didn’t want to be a special target of any of those demons, but particularly not Wallick.”
“Wallick killed Kobinski?” Aharon asked, glimpsing an end to this story.
“Killed him? He wanted to break him. Can you break a dead man?”
“I really don’t need to—”
“He beat him, often. Every time he saw him. With a stick he beat him—sometimes just a little, sometimes a lot, till there was blood covering his face. Even in a place like Auschwitz, where you saw everything, it was still upsetting to see such a great rebbe covered with blood like this.”
“I think I—”
“Then there was mealtime. Wallick would come through after we’d been served our nothing soup of water and potato peelings, and he’d always time it just so. Anyone else in the same situation would have gobbled the soup in line, as soon as they got it, but Kobinski never did. Can you imagine it? Day after day he stands in line, gets his soup, smiles at the inmates handing it out, waits for his son, walks calmly to find a place to sit—never hurries, never acts as if anything were wrong. Then as soon as he sits—bam—Wallick comes along and knocks the bowl from his hands. And Kobinski just sits there, looking at the spilled soup while everyone else goes after it on hands and knees, eating the wet dirt trying to get a little nutrition.”
Biederer sighed. “I’ll tell you who it hurt—his son, Isaac. Sometimes I saw tears running down his face as they walked away from the line with their pitiful bowls. Once I heard him urge his father as they walked past me, ‘Eat, Papa; eat now,’ and his father said, ‘We must first find a seat,’ in a pleasant voice. Oh, the poor boy—what a curse, to have such a great rebbe for a father!”
Something trembled on the tip of Biederer’s tongue, trembled like the moisture on the edges of his eyelids. But he shook his head. “One thing at a time.” He took an enormous breath. “What else did Wallick do to Kobinski? Latrine duty, all the time. Horrible. Truly horrible, such a great scholar crawling around in absolute filth. Disgusting! Wallick wouldn’t allow him any help during the day, but when his followers got back from their own labor sometimes he would still be at it and they’d finish for him.”
Biederer pointed those smoking fingers at Aharon. White streamers drifted around his face like premonitions of his shroud. “I’m telling you, the stink of such a place—you can take it maybe two minutes without vomiting. Buckets and buckets of the worst… ! It’s not just normal slops, see. Everyone was sick with diarrhea, typhus, every illness known to man. And the smell starvation gives a man’s guts… ! This is hell, I’m telling you.”
“Please,” Aharon said weakly. He could smell it. A distinct scent of urine and feces was in his nostrils. He stood up and went over to the window, no longer caring about Biederer. He opened it fully, pulling up the blinds. He leaned out and gulped in fresh air. But the air outside was so hot by now that it did little to clear his head, only sat in his lungs like wet towels.
“But none of this—none of it broke Kobinski.”
Biederer’s voice came from behind his head, like the voice of the dead. There was that heavy weight in the old man’s voice again, something large unsaid. But this time, Aharon had the feeling he would say it. Aharon couldn’t stop him. He couldn’t even open his mouth to talk.
“Not…” Biederer said with a thick tongue, “not until Wallick began to mess with his son.”
“Please, Lord.” Hot tears of pain and frustration filled Aharon’s eyes. He pushed against the sill to stand. He went over to the chair and picked up his coat. “Shalom, Mr. Biederer.”
“Okay, Rabbi Handalman,” Biederer said, his hands out and down in surrender.
“No, I’m sorry, but—”
“So I’ll stop,” Biederer said firmly.
Aharon stood still, coat and hat in hand. The sweat tickled as it ran down his cheeks into his beard. Biederer made a gesture upward with his outstretched hands—nu?
“I don’t need to hear any more.” Aharon put on his hat.
“There’s more. So we’ll skip the son. I can’t say I blame you there. But I have something you want. It’s about the rebbe’s work. So sit.”
Aharon fingered his coat for a moment. He slowly removed his hat and returned to his seat. He was beginning to hate Biederer. The old sadist, he had some kind of perverted desire to pass along that black chip in his heart, poisonous and festering.
“It was after Wallick had… well, Isaac was no longer in our barrack.”
“He was dead,” Aharon said with a resigned sigh.
“No,” Biederer said, eyes bright and terrible. He took another cigarette. “But you don’t want to hear about that, so you won’t hear. Since you’re so delicate, Rabbi Handalman. I know your type. Yes, I know your type.”
Aharon clenched his fists on his hat brim. “Say what you have to say.”
“After Isaac left the barrack Kobinski finally began to wake up to reality—you know what I’m saying? He became obsessed with finding a way out of Auschwitz. Somehow Anatoli managed to smuggle in a map of the area. Kobinski pored over that map, drawing lines and numbers. Some said he was using astrology; others said it was devils’ work.”
Aharon sat forward on his chair rigidly. What was this?
“He told us he had found a gateway.” Biederer looked sheepish, as if knowing it sounded crazy. “A gateway to… to Heaven. It was out in the woods, about a mile from camp. If we could only get to it.”
Aharon felt a surge of disappointment. This was what he had come here for? Sat through all this horrible sewage of the past? “That’s ludicrous!”
Biederer shrugged. He leaned back, tapped his foot, but there was a stubborn look in his eye, the look of a true believer. “Maybe. And maybe some people even back then didn’t believe him—maybe most people. But some did,” pointing his cigarette/fingers at Aharon. “Some said he was a great kabbalist, that he could call down a heavenly chariot like Ezekiel. And maybe some just thought they had nothing to lose.”
“This is the escape attempt?” Aharon said, connecting this with what he’d read at Yad Vashem. Biederer nodded.
Aharon huffed. “But everyone was killed that night! Rabbi Kobinski—may he rest in peace—he must have been driven over the edge. I’m sorry for it, but it’s true.”
Biederer leaned forward and took his cup, drank from it. He shook his head. “No, Rabbi Handalman.”
“How do you know?”
“Because it worked.”
Aharon stared at him, astonished. There was something so calm and triumphant on Biederer’s face that Aharon was intimidated to stillness.
“You can think what you like—who can stop you? But what happened, happened. I didn’t go. I was afraid; that’s God’s truth. About ten men from our barrack went. Only two returned—Anatoli was one of them. They managed to slip away from the others in the darkness and made it back to camp. They told us.”