Hold the stinking Jew dog tight, don’t you dare let go of him, yelled the first monk.
He came to only when in the lazily vaporous silence the large naked men were already standing around him.
Both his shoes were there, on his feet, as if nothing had happened.
Someone had brought some warm water and poured it into the shoes, but that had accomplished nothing, it poured right out.
In the meantime the two monks had disappeared.
He must be dreaming, should wake up; or could the earth have swallowed them up. Their absence made him think all this was really nothing but a dream and he was only replacing one painful dream with another. Instead of the monk who had been there before, now a large naked man was squatting before him, his long coal-black hair fallen over his forehead, knitting his thick, long-haired eyebrows a little distrustfully. He listened with his lively eyes set too close to each other, and he was speaking, kept speaking to the boy, who understood every word even though he couldn’t place the stranger’s language. As if he had never heard it.
He said he was some kind of lieutenant, he mentioned his name too, some lieutenant in some army, maybe the Royal Air Force, and he was curiously waiting for him to say his name, and where he was born, where he was from.
From where had he been deported.
From where, indeed.
The lieutenant’s lips parted halfway, he leaned very close, his healthy white teeth flashed encouragingly, but then his sweeping black lashes began to flutter with disappointment because in this unfamiliar language the boy could tell him only the number. The five-digit number, as it was, as they could see on his lower left arm; he showed it to them as his name. Why should he hide it, if they had given it to him instead of his name. Someone was holding his arm, held it down and drew his fingers across it as if to test the reality of the numbers, but seemed to be commiserating a little. Perhaps he could also say his name if he really put his mind to it, but he didn’t want to, and therefore he didn’t remember it, even though he thought about it. The lieutenant looked Italian, or at least not the way the boy imagined Hungarians looked. And he could not understand what a Hungarian was doing in the British Army.
In the meantime the others came up with the idea of soaking the boy’s feet, with his shoes on, in a large bucket. The insane logic of recent events could not be broken by the demands of common sense.
Everything continued in its own way. Until now they had used these buckets to throw cold water at each other. They were pleased with their idea. He laughed along with them, though he did not become as excited as they did. The water was undoubtedly nice and warm; at first it burned but he was glad to be among such attractive people. The lieutenant was only watching him now; he’d stopped asking questions. Then he noticed, in the midst of the general laughter, that one of the monks was standing with his back to him, not very far off, leaning his head on the white wet tiles, covering his face with both arms. As he watched the trembling shoulders, the boy was not certain they weren’t shaking with laughter, and he wondered who could have said something so funny or whether they were laughing at him.
Finally he asked the naked man, whose black hair ran up from his belly in parallel stripes, something like water in a fountain, all the way to his neck, from where it fell back to frame his chest muscles, what they had done with his coat.
It was odd that he could say anything in this unfamiliar language.
The lieutenant showed him, there, look, they’re burning it right now.
And indeed he saw that the other monk was shoving his belongings into the fire.
He didn’t trust this lieutenant, because he wasn’t as white and red as the others, but skinny, as though he himself had been a prisoner for a few weeks.
Don’t worry, said the lieutenant, you’ll get regular clothes from them, and they won’t let things get out of hand. True, they did delay a bit, but now they see the situation for what it is. They will retaliate. If he just listened, he could hear what was happening that very moment.
And he could, very faintly, penetrating the old monastery walls, the sound of motorcycles being revved up.
The lieutenant was nodding, yes, yes, an entire motorcycle company, flying like swallows, seventy-nine cycles all told, among them twenty-seven with sidecars, 123 men all told. It showed on his face what profound self-assurance and superiority his disciplined thirst for revenge was lending him. They won’t do anything extraordinary. All they really had to do was wall in two city gates; they studied the maps. The whole operation would take a very short time.
He would have liked to beg and implore, don’t let them do it, to shout that nothing happened, victims, innocents.
But the words drowned in him before he could shout them.
How could he claim such a thing when not even one among them could be considered innocent. And then he would have tried to argue differently. The lieutenant could see that not everyone had been killed; after all, he, along with his twin brother, had survived. Only he could not talk about this either, he had to keep quiet about his twin brother, who had just killed a man named Döhring. He knew of this in his dream, oddly. But then is there anything I shouldn’t keep quiet about.
In his agony, he began to throw himself about, he felt as if they had cut off his arms and legs, he shouted senselessly as one struggling to wake up.
I can’t keep quiet about everything.
He was shouting in vain because the attractive naked men lifted him up and put him in the tub while he could hear — and the dark-haired lieutenant even raised his finger to call attention to it — that the swallows had flown away, the motorcyclists were gone. By next morning, the city would be walled in and the people of Pfeilen would have to perish. Over the empty Kloosterplein, clouds of gasoline vapor hover in the evening stillness. Everything comes to pass. It is impossible to prevent what has to happen, to stop anything. While several men were washing, scrubbing, and soaping him at the same time, and the noise, the cacophony increased again in the bathing hall, and everybody was talking, laughing, and shouting simultaneously, through the cracks in the walls and doors, unseen, thick gas was seeping in to mingle smoothly and treacherously with the chamomile-scented steam.
And the attractive naked men now thought he had fainted because of the gas.
The wretch is so weak, they said laughing, he can’t withstand even a little gasoline vapor. But he lost consciousness because of his premonition. He did not know who he was. Because of the staggering knowledge that while he was enjoying his bath, and he could not but enjoy it and even think of the promised sweet milk, the catastrophe had come to pass.
He didn’t know what all this meant, who might be his people; he was searching for the meaning of his own dread.
And then it occurred to him that it hadn’t been his grandfather’s shift but that of the religion teacher.
What luck.
He could see from above how they were approaching from two directions at once, in close formation, their headlights rending the early night asunder.
He delayed no longer; the teacher of religion sounded the bell for the second time that day. He did it cautiously, barely touching the body of the bell with the blunt clapper, briefly; the penetrating sharp little sound could be heard over the dark town lying in ruins. This was followed by a terrible crack, bang, and snap, then a detonation, then a single resonance reminiscent of a bell ringing, but this was coming from below the ground. The earth, the entire half-dead little town and its distant environs, trembled, people were thrown out of their beds; even the thick monastery walls in faraway Venlo were shaking. For a second, silence fell in the bathing hall; the naked soldiers listened; only the noise of water rushing from the showerheads could be heard.