However, it was the arms that were most deserving of mercy. They still showed the marks of the thongs from morning prayers. They hung limply like withered boughs of trees in the Jewish cemetery. This is what the biblical Joseph must have looked like when his brethren stripped his clothes from him and cast him into a pit, later to sell him to the Ishmaelites. Jellinek was filled with pity at the sight of this man. Calmly, with no trace of irony, he asked:
“What is your civilian occupation?”
“A Kestkind!” replied Blumenkrantz in an expressionless voice, showing neither fear nor contempt. Jellinek was now completely taken aback. So the Jew was in no doubt that staff surgeon Jellinek would understand Yiddish? Dr Jellinek? Dr Jellinek did understand Yiddish. He knew that a “Kestkind” was a son-in-law enabled by his wife’s parents to freely study the Holy Scriptures, being accepted into their home and supported at their cost. He recalled his own father and his own youth. His father had been storeman at a brewery in Olomouc. He had lain at rest in the Jewish cemetery in Prague for thirty years now. Twice a year, on the Day of Atonement and on the anniversary of his death (according to the Jewish calendar), Dr Jellinek offered prayers at Yiskor and Kaddish services for the peace of his father Hersch’s soul in the reformed synagogue, where he went in civilian dress, wearing a top hat. Frequently, however, he was represented at these services by specially hired Jews. Just such a one was the Jew who now stood before him, naked and at his mercy. He gave them money for candles, entrusting to them the care of his father’s soul, just as he had once, on the day of his death, entrusted them to wash his body and place him in the coffin. By then he was a medical student. He earned money as a tutor to support his mother, but he was unable to continue his expensive studies without financial support. This support was provided by the army. He became a Kestkind of the Emperor. In return for this, he undertook to stay on as an army doctor after the completion of his studies. He began his service as an assistant surgeon in the garrison hospital at Olomouc. A few years later he was promoted, whereupon they transferred him to Galicia. He was forced out of Jarosław by colleagues, army doctors, because he did not accept bribes as they did. At his own request, he was transferred to Wadowice as a regimental doctor attached to one of the regional defence regiments stationed there. There he married a poor girl who also came from the Czech lands. In Wadowice his elder daughter Klara was born. He arranged a good education for her in Prague, including piano lessons at the conservatory. Klara was unattractive. Nevertheless, a certain lawyer from Moravská Ostrava was inclined to marry her. But lawyers in those parts do not marry without a dowry. Dr Jellinek was a good son and a good husband, so why would he not be a good father? Although nothing could be proved, his growing income aroused suspicion, especially in a small town like Wadowice. So he was transferred from Galicia (where the boundary between virtue and transgression is very flexible, as is well known) to Innsbruck, this time at his own request. Tyrol is famous for its honesty, its piety and its aversion to Jews. The Alpine climate, full of ozone and Aryanism, was not congenial to Dr Jellinek. He was not at ease among edelweiss, yodellers and the traditions of Andreas Hofer. When Klara finally got married, he resigned and transferred to the reserve as a staff surgeon. The war found him in Karlsbad, where he struggled to acquire rich patients from Russia and Romania. He wore uniform once more, attached his spurs, kissed his wife and kissed his younger daughter Hermina, whose dowry he now had to muster (“Mein Kind, mein innig geliebtes Kind,”[5] he later wrote to her in letters from the field)—and set off to war. He began at Lwów in Reserve Hospital No. 1, at the polyclinic. Several days later he was assigned to the Recruitment Commission at Śniatyn.
It followed that the matter of Miss Hermina Jellinek’s dowry—apparently one of her father’s Karlsbad failures, forgotten till now—had now unexpectedly re-emerged. The impeccability of Doctor Jellinek’s source of income was in fact ensured by the grey-haired, desiccated colonel who (supposedly) chaired the Commission mainly for this purpose. In practice, however, he chaired it in name only. In reality Doctor Jellinek was all-powerful around here and could pass judgement in the light of his own conscience and his own needs. Jellinek was always correct in the eyes of the colonel. Injustices committed in favour of those who were capable of distinguishing between “A” and “B” and between “C” and “D”, and of assigning a value to these distinctions in jingling cash, were balanced by indiscriminately declaring fit for military service the bodies of all illiterates as well as those unable to pay. However, he was not always governed by good sense and dispassionate calculation. Sometimes his heart also ruled, and whether he merely took pity on the naked Jew Blumenkrantz or whether it also had something to do with the memory of his father, he decided to give him complete exemption. For now, he wanted to forget him. He postponed the examination. Summoning what was left of his tattered pride, he pulled himself together and clicked his heels. His spurs rang out. Doctor Jellinek turned away from the Jew.
He went over to the weighing scales, on which at that moment there stood a body—Niewiadomski. Corporal Kuryluk was already moistening his chest with a wet sponge. Then he took an indelible pencil and wrote the number 67 on his chest. Sixty-seven kilograms live weight. Piotr did not understand why they were weighing him. He felt like a slaughtered beast at the abattoir. Indeed, these numbers written on human chests were reminiscent of veterinary officials’ purple stamps. It was official confirmation that our flesh contained nothing toxic and was fit for consumption. Next, Corporal Kuryluk ordered Piotr to stand by the post which looked like a gallows. He lowered the crossbar onto his head. It was a device for accurately measuring height. The crossbar was reminiscent of the skimming-stick used in pubs to remove superfluous foam from mugs of beer. Here, however, it was used to remove from people’s heads any delusions of taller stature their hair might have given them. Hair did not count. Having carried out this task, Kuryluk drew a slanting line below the number 67 and added the height measurement—169. Piotr was now approached by another NCO with a tailor’s tape-measure.
“Raise your arms!” he shouted, seeing that Piotr was covering his private parts with the documents. He took the papers from him and put them on the table at which the Commission was seated. Then he took Piotr’s chest measurement. Piotr started trembling—not because of the cold and not because he was frightened, but out of embarrassment. Only now, in this hall where all the men, both military personnel and civilians, were sitting fully dressed and buttoned up to the chin did his embarrassment reach its peak. In the changing room out there, where all the bodies were naked, Piotr’s shame had been rather a religious sense of nakedness, a mournful reminder of original sin, a revelation of the secret of love and death. Here, not only did it scorch his body and torment his soul, but it turned into anger. No, there had never been anything like it! Nobody had ever seen his shame in broad daylight. He always went to women in the dark and wearing a nightshirt. He extinguished the light when he lay down with Magda. No man intentionally looked on his own shame, even in the bath.
So here was an embarrassed man standing with his body before the people. The very nakedness of this body, the last possession of a pauper, was no longer his own property. He felt like an animal, a dog, like Bass. He would not have been surprised if they had now ordered him to go on all fours. Let them kick him, let them beat him, as long as they did not look him over like this. Of course, he had come naked from the womb of his mother Wasylina, and he would one day emerge naked from the womb of Mother Earth to stand before the final Commission in the Valley of Jehoshaphat. But here no archangels’ trumpets are heard. From time to time cars honked out on the road.