This time the silence was due to my not knowing what to say. "I'm sorry, Vilmos,’’ was what I finally came up with. Far from eloquent, but genuine and heartfelt nonetheless.
Vilmos smiled that sad smile again. “Apology accepted, Adam. And you're right. Zoltan did a cowardly, selfish thing. An immoral, unconscionable thing. He is not the man I knew in university. But I don't meet with him because of who he is. I meet with him because of who he was. Because when I’m with him, I become, for a short magical while, the young student I was when I knew him. I’m transported beyond these fences, outside of this wretched camp, and back to a time when there was proper food, and proper clothes, and proper shoes, and proper hopes and dreams. Do you understand, Adam?”
"Yes," I said, shame making my voice small.
Vilmos nodded. Then his face broke into a wide grin. “Besides, Zoltan has his moments. Why do you think he bought that soap? For whom do you think he wished to be clean? A man gives up his bread to be just a little less dirty for you—it says something about how he sees and values you, doesn't it?"
"It most certainly does,” I said.
"That's part of his charm. He’s a romantic. That’s one thing this place hasn’t squashed out of him."
I nodded, and then a thought struck me.
"Is Zoltan sick?" I asked.
Vilmos coughed. The sound like unoiled cogs grinding. “We're all sick, aren’t we?”
"I mean more than the usual.”
"No, I don’t think so. Why do you ask?"
"I was just wondering what he needed medicine for,” I said, though seeing Vil-mos’s flushed cheeks and clammy forehead, and hearing his raspy breath and rattling cough, I knew. Zoltan had been trying to get medicine for Vilmos. He might have been a coward, but he wasn’t all bad.
"I don’t know," Vilmos said, though he clearly did.
"Are you all right, Vilmos?" I said, though I could tell that he wasn’t, that he had gotten worse over the past few days.
"Yes," he said, trying and failing to bite back another cough. "I’m fine. Don’t you worry about me. Now, shall we go and find the Mumbler?”
19
It didn't take us long to find him. He was walking by the northern fence through which one could stare across a service road into what prisoners called Mexico—a new, partially built extension of the camp, which was now home to thousands of Hungarian Jewish women.
The men’s camp was horrendous enough, but Mexico was even worse. Here there were no washrooms and no latrines. Here the blocks were incomplete. It was said that some of them lacked bunks and that the women had to sleep on the hard floor.
The women themselves looked especially miserable. Many were not given prisoner uniforms. The lucky ones wore torn, bedraggled dresses—the refuse of looted clothes which the Nazis hadn’t wanted for themselves—while others had to make do with rags or dirty blankets which they caped around themselves to hide their nakedness. They wandered about the desolate wasteland that was Mexico like starved sleepwalkers.
Why this section of the camp got the name Mexico was unclear. Perhaps because, unlike Canada, Mexico had the image of a poor, undeveloped country, where basic facilities were scarce. I could only hope none of my sisters had been put into Mexico. I doubted anyone could survive for long there.
The Mumbler was all alone, as usual. A muselmann was a solitary creature by nature. Other prisoners avoided them as much as possible, and they themselves grew more and more detached from their environment, until finally they made the ultimate departure and died, usually not long after becoming a muselmann.
But the Mumbler was special. Because by some mysterious manner, he had managed to live for longer than his condition should allow. Not only had he staved off death by starvation, he had also survived a camp-wide selection, the latter despite him clearly being unfit for work and on the brink of death, which would normally have earned him a trip to the gas chambers.
When Vilmos and I found him, he was plodding along at a tottering shuffle, his feet barely clearing the ground. Each step was so laborious it seemed certain to be his last, but then came another, as sluggish and onerous as its predecessor.
As we got closer to him, my ears began to pick up the steady, relentless burr of his mumbling, for which he had earned his nickname. His language was German, but his accent was nonexistent, as his flat, meandering speech was smoothed of all inflection.
"Cream tart, grilled sausage, potato pancake, sauerkraut, roast beef stew, egg noodles, pretzel, gingerbread cookies, coffee with sugar, apple strudel, black forest cake...” was just part of the caravan of foods the Mumbler was reciting.
This was a common symptom of being a muselmann. While ordinary prisoners generally avoided talking about the delicious foods they had known as free men, as this would only augment the pain of their absence, a muselmann seemed able to speak of little else. Yet another reason why prisoners steered clear of them.
"Hey," I said, but the Mumbler did not appear to have heard me. He kept up his litany of delicacies, drool snaking from his lips, his eyes gigantic and bulging in his skeletal head.
Up close, the stench he exuded overwhelmed that of our own. As part of his descent into a muselmann, he had abandoned any pretense at cleanliness. Not only that, but his condition affected his bowel movements, which had become runny and continuous, and he was either unable to hold them in or he had ceased to try. He stank like an outhouse in heat. Bile rose, acidic and biting, to the base of my throat. Beside me, Vilmos raised a hand to cover his nose. The Mumbler was not offended by this show of disgust. He might not have noticed it at all.
"Butter pastries, blintzes, rugelach, crispy schnitzel with mashed potatoes, boiled asparagus with sauce...”
I stepped in front of him, blocking his path. He stopped, and also fell silent. His eyes swam over my face. They held a look of profound wonderment, as though I were an unfamiliar creature who had suddenly dropped from the sky. This was ironic because the Mumbler himself was such a creature, a nightmarish apparition of horror and deprivation.
He was a man stripped of flesh. All that remained was skin and bones, like an exhibit in a nature museum of some extinct humanoid. His cheekbones stood out like twin shovel blades under paper-thin skin stretched so tightly it looked ready to split. His cheeks were sunken, as though he were ceaselessly sucking them in. His lips were two colorless pencil lines bordering a jutting mouth missing all four front teeth. Through the gap, the tip of his tongue peeked like a bird sticking its head between the bars of its cage. His hands could have belonged to a centenarian, with elongated fingers and the bones and tendons showing starkly on the back of his hands. The stubble on his jaw was uneven, broken by patches of bald, flaky skin.
He had been partially claimed by death already. Yet some piece of him stubbornly clung to the world of the living—enough to keep his heart beating and his lungs drawing air, though gradually shedding more and more of what made him a man.
Now he was staring at me with his huge innocent dark eyes. “Mother will be down soon," he said pleasantly. "Dinner is almost ready. Just a few minutes.” He blinked, and his gaze began to roam again. "Chicken broth, potatoes with rosemary, freshly baked bread, dumplings, champagne, chocolate cake for dessert." He licked his lips, and his eyes regained their focus. “So glad you could come."