59
Peter Orenstein laughs, attaches himself to the bottle and drains it in a few gulps. ‘If I’m describing things as they are, Amara, it’s only for you; the others disgust me, I don’t know who they are and I don’t want to know. You think yourself superior because you’ve never descended to the lowest dregs of self-disgust; we were all killers, the strongest against the weakest, even against those we should have helped and supported. There is no peace, there never can be any peace for us because they made us do things that will always make us feel dirty, horribly filthy and stained; but how they flew, those rapacious creatures, I saw them rise into the air with their great wings that cast gigantic shadows, I envied them their freedom to fly over the camp, their eyes always alert and if they caught sight of a prey even the least bit appetising, they would snap their wings shut and hurl themselves at the earth, expert at snatching up the right body in a single beakful … some were too fat to rise again in flight, but others no, they cried out like falcons … corrupt, you understand? Corrupt and degraded, that’s what they enjoyed, reducing us to the same condition as themselves, robbing us of our self-esteem … they tried repeatedly and they succeeded, at least with me they did … the political prisoners survived better, they were united, had clandestine organisations, mutual solidarity, a network of informers, but isolated individuals like me, what could we do? Drag off the dead bodies of our friends, wipe away their faeces, fling them on the barrows, push them up to the ovens and shove them in three at a time. Do you know what they discovered? That if a woman’s body was put in with two men, the men burned better. Because women’s bodies have reserves of fat that we men lack, what a laugh … fat hiding heaven knows where in all that starvation but it did exist … all the more of course if the woman had just been brought by train from some city where she had been able to eat something … and you can sit with your legs apart holding the head of a corpse and clipping off all its hair without feeling anything at all; you can open the mouth of some dead gaffer and wrench out a gold tooth with pliers before washing it in formalin, carefully removing any remaining fragments of flesh before cleaning it properly with a little brush specially made for the purpose and throwing it into a bucket for your fellow-worker to add to a collection for heating and melting down as part of a gold bar to be handed to the official camp treasurer to be forwarded to the Reichsbank, you understand that, lovely? A human being is capable of doing absolutely anything to survive and that fact is our most disgusting and unpardonable quality, that deadened us more effectively than anything else.’
He puts his hand up to his head, pulling his few remaining grey hairs with a horrible grimace as if to help him draw breath before continuing.
‘My hair grew back to some extent when I came out and started eating again, but I had become bald inside, stripped of thought and feeling … everything seemed to have changed with the end of the war: I was alive, you see, how could anything else matter compared to that? I thought I could distance myself for ever from that thieving whoring child who had performed disgusting acrobatics in order to survive, but how could I escape myself now that I was putting on weight and my hair was growing again, and I was even once more becoming a conscious being? I changed my name and way of life and went into a monastery but didn’t take vows, everything I tried soon disgusted me … I got married and had a son, and I thought that had solved the problem. But no, when my son was a year old I started kicking him, he horrified me … my wife ran away with the child, even if she understood, she did understand me, but she could not leave the child exposed to my frenzy.’