Now they had to part, which evidently did not bother Peix, or at least he did not let it interrupt his important business. But it did bother Bulla, the trashy little Polish squealer: in the harsh light cast on the lower part of his face he pretended to be attentive to Peix while nervously blinking in the darkness at Kramer, wondering what would happen next. Bulla limped badly; his mates had once picked him up and thrown him from the second-story window of the laundry. They heaved him out so he would fall on his spine, but it did not happen that way. He was Eisele’s personal informer. If Kramer had not fixed his terrible open fractures and if Peix against his better judgment had not nursed him so devotedly, he would never have walked again. Peix wanted to kill him; he asked that Bulla be given a small dose of sedative, which in the language of the criminals meant enough to put the squealer out of his misery.
Peix also threatened: if Kramer was unwilling, he would do it himself.
Save it for others, for a worthier patient, Kramer said; his quiet self-assurance calmed the boy down even in the most critical situations. He wouldn’t have wanted to pick a fight with Eisele over such a senseless murder. Someone willing would come along and do it anyway. Informers could not support themselves for long; they never had more than half a year to squeal on people, though during that time they managed to have many prisoners put away. Peix also made his pretty boys disappear, one after the other, whenever they grew chubby and he became bored with them. He would tell them he had heard them coughing and tuberculosis was not a disease to walk around with, they should report to the sick bay, and there, within a few days, the SS doctors took care of them, without exception. Wherever Peix appeared, everyone tried hard not to cough. Strong, large men especially had much to fear. Kramer overlooked Peix’s ongoing manhunt, or he forced himself to pretend not to notice what his friend was doing. He overlooked many things he could not help noticing, in hopes that one day, with his help, Peix would come to his senses and realize who he really was. In the depth of his soul, though, he had long understood that, shameful as it was, all his apprehensions had come true. From this icily cool-headed boy he learned much about the lives of criminals and their ways of thinking; without these experiences the communist cell could not have taken up the struggle against them in the camp; but he had failed miserably with his own pedagogical strategy.
What the boy willingly took from him was never what he had wanted to give him.
But what was he to do if this boy was the only human being in the world whom he loved so much. Perhaps he loved him because of his irresponsibility and unpredictability. The boy was more levelheaded than anyone he’d ever met, but still, his soul was crumbling in the depths of madness. The truth was that Peix loved him even more than he loved Peix, Peix loved him immoderately, with all the inner turbulence of his madness. He usually feared robust, big men like Kramer. It was hard for him to get used to the knowledge that Kramer would never hit him or punish him. In Buchenwald, he jerked away his head if Kramer stepped closer to him or addressed him in a loud voice. Kramer managed to laugh hard when this happened, because he understood the boy well; and the boy was ashamed.
Kiss my ass, he yelled at him, get your kicks somewhere else, not with me.
And what would happen if he did hit him once, Kramer often wondered, would that be of any use. Because the jerking of his head meant that, except for being hit, the boy would not accept any other proof of love.
Lemme alone, already, Peix shouted, stop bugging me. Beat your meat, play with your cock, that’s what you should play with. Find something else to do. Get off my back.
Kramer laughed at Peix’s fits of rage; he kept laughing at him very loudly until Peix gave up.
You garbage, you shit, Peix would hiss, as if his teeth were being pulled; you pig swill, you shit, he hissed.
But why would he hit him.
He had never loved anyone like this, so senselessly, purposelessly, and unconditionally. As if he were wishing to redeem the other’s soul with his own. He loved him with every experience of his life, with his entire social wisdom honed on Marxism, with his messianic fervor; he loved the future in the boy. Then how could he possibly admit to himself that he had made a mistake. They should at least have killed Bulla. I made a big, big mistake, he said to himself. Although he could not acknowledge, not even to himself, that it was not a person’s circumstances that determined how that person would go. Not even birth was an influence strong enough to make a person good or evil. In Buchenwald he managed to convince his comrades with the same arguments he had used on himself, but here they reached the very end of the human world’s possibilities, and now he sees that there are no more possibilities, there is no future tense and there never has been one. Yes, here, in the very center of human misery and baseness, here, in hell, he wants to prove, he thundered to his comrades, that no one is born a criminal.
Where else, my dear sweet comrades.
But in the matter of criminality, the others had eyes too. They quickly called him to account about Peix, and he could expect the very worst.
He laughed at them lustily, at what they might have been thinking about him.
The comrades did not see how brazenly he was lying. But his comrades could see that a man who spoke and laughed like that was probably unaware of his own dangerous nature.
It was a very telling indicator that they called a meeting of cell leaders for Sunday afternoon without him. Bruno Apitz was there, in the bathhouse behind the laundry, and Fritz Lettow and Gustav Wegerer, and they sent for him only after they had made their decision about him.
They were going to withdraw him from circulation.
It was spring; the sun was warming everything.
A wondrous spring in the indecent woods of Buchenwald. A time when a man walking thinks, well, I’ve managed to survive this hard winter. And that he’s not alone. This is what he was thinking as he walked, because he really was not alone. Now only better things can happen. Birds were making a din, singing. A gigantic oak stood in front of the laundry. It had to be at least four hundred years old. The prisoners liked to think of it as Goethe’s tree under which he used to rest with Eckermann, who in some way must have been his friend, after all.* The way Peix was his. And when he thought of this, he somehow forgave Goethe too, which made him feel as if suddenly he’d found an explanation for nature’s terrible indifference.
Anyone going to the bathhouse had to pass in front of the laundry, but few people were allowed to walk freely on the camp’s roads and footpaths except for Kramer. The terrible bathhouse was an enormous white tiled hall, with more than two hundred showerheads in the ceiling, of which about two dozen were dripping, the sound of the drops echoing loudly. Through the multipaned windows, open on this Sunday afternoon, one could see the famous oak from a slightly higher angle; the woods were lower down and much farther away, vanishing into infinity beyond the electrified barbed-wire fence. The three men sat on a bench inside the bath, warming their backs and shoulders in the sun coming through the window.
He succeeded in convincing them that without the criminals they would not be able to win the battle with the criminals.
They asked him to wait outside while they made their next decision.
While they deliberated long and rescinded their earlier decision, Kramer waited in the wintry-cool shadow of the bathhouse, looking into the distance above the oak, above the woods. Until they called him back in, he shuddered slightly with fear, though he was not afraid of death. He was not afraid that his comrades would kill him. That would be more like a kind of mercy. There was no point in hoping or knowing that in the end his comrades would see reason. He was trembling a little. They can do nothing else, and he cannot do anything else. It was not his fear of death but his dread of life — that is what he feared so much, that they would thrust him out from among themselves, and then his entire life would become senseless retroactively and his death would be senseless too. All his activity until now would lose significance. There would not be an iota of sacrifice in his death.