I KNOW YOU’LL COME BACK became the heart-shovel’s accomplice and the hunger angel’s adversary. And because I did come back, I can say: a sentence like that keeps you alive.
It was three in the morning, on the fifteenth of January, 1945, when the patrol came for me. The cold was getting worse: it was −15° C.
We rode in a canvas-topped truck through the empty town to the exhibition hall. The Transylvanian Saxons had used it as a banquet hall. Now it was an assembly camp. Some 300 people were crammed inside. Mattresses and straw sacks lay strewn on the floor. Vehicles arrived throughout the night, from the surrounding villages as well as from the town, and unloaded the people who’d been collected. It was impossible to count how many, there was no way to see everything, even though the light in the hall stayed on the whole night. Toward morning I counted nearly 500. People ran around looking for acquaintances. Word had it that carpenters were being requisitioned at the train station, that they were outfitting the cattle cars with plank beds made of fresh lumber. And that other craftsmen were equipping the trains with cylindrical stoves. And that others were sawing toilet holes into the floor. People talked a lot, quietly, with eyes wide open, and they cried a lot, quietly, with eyes shut. The air smelled of old wool, sweaty fear and greasy meat, vanilla pastries, liquor. One woman took off her headscarf. She was obviously from the country, her braid had been doubled and pinned up to the top of her head with a semicircular horn comb. The teeth of the comb disappeared in her hair, but the two corners of its curved edge stuck out like little pointed ears. The ears and her thick braid made the back of her head look like a sitting cat. I sat like a spectator in the middle of all the legs and luggage. For a few minutes I fell asleep and dreamed:
My mother and I are in a cemetery, standing in front of a freshly dug grave. A plant half my height is growing in the middle of the grave. The leaves are furry, and its stem has a pod with a leather handle, a little suitcase. The pod is open the width of a finger and lined with fox-red velvet. We don’t know who has died. My mother says: Take the chalk out of your coat pocket. But I don’t have any, I say. I reach in my pocket and find a piece of tailor’s chalk. My mother says: We have to write a short name on the suitcase. Let’s write RUTH—we don’t know anybody named that. I write RUHT—rests, as on a gravestone.
In my dream it was clear to me that I had died, but I didn’t want to tell my mother just yet. I was startled out of my sleep by an older man with an umbrella who sat down on the straw sack next to me and spoke into my ear: My brother-in-law wants to come, but the place is guarded. They won’t let him in. We’re still in town, he can’t come here, and I can’t go home. A bird was flying on each silver button of the man’s jacket—a wild duck, or rather an albatross, because the cross on his badge turned into an anchor when I leaned in closer. The umbrella stood between us like a walking stick. I asked: Are you taking that along. Yes I am, he said, it snows even more there than it does here.
No one told us how or when we were supposed to leave the hall—or I should say, when we’d be allowed to leave, since I was anxious to get going, even if that meant traveling to Russia in a cattle car with a gramophone box and a velvet collar around my neck. I don’t remember how we finally got to the station, just that the cattle cars were tall. I’ve also forgotten the boarding, we spent so many days and nights traveling in the cattle car, it seemed we’d been there forever. Nor can I remember how long we stayed on the train. I thought that traveling a long time meant we were traveling a great distance. As long as we keep moving, I thought, nothing can happen. As long as we keep moving, everything is fine.
Men and women, young and old, their bags stacked at the head of their plank beds, talking and