The Thief of Auschwitz (23 page)

Yet they want her back tomorrow.

He keeps that thought in his mind as he raises the scissor and comb. It’s all he has to sustain him.

*

The day’s steady fall of rain has softened the ground a little, so while the other women eat their evening meal or divide it up so as to keep out a morsel or two for tomorrow’s breakfast, Gretel decides that the time has come to bury her vinegar bottle. She wolfs down a scrap of bread and a tough waxy rind of cheese and slips away from the others, explaining that she’s on her way to the latrine, stopping as she goes at the spot where she’s hidden the bottle in the rafters over her bunk. It’s as full as she can make it, and when she gets outdoors she plugs up the neck with a stone that fits pretty well and packs the rest of the opening with mud. It will have to do.

Searchlights in the yard pierce the rain and materialize out of the darkness like blades, some tracking steadily through the air and others slashing and swerving like things gone mad, all depending on the relative commitment or lassitude of the men behind them, men whose work is at best driven by certain private theories and principles that no handbook of operations could formalize. The result is a random and moving maze of hard light in darkness, which is probably as efficient a result as any. No one else is outdoors. Just wet men huddled together in windswept towers and fully saturated men standing at attention along fencelines and this one lone woman. She finishes sealing the neck and rises up from the dirt and tucks the bottle into her sleeve to keep it from reflecting light. Her instinct is to dodge and duck the moving beams, but since furtiveness can only lead to trouble she keeps her wits about her and walks slowly toward the latrine, vanishing at the last instant around the corner and back toward the place she’s chosen as the burial site. The spot where rain drips from the roof and loosens the gravel and makes the clay soft.

She takes off one shoe to dig, kneeling down in the wet mud with the gravel cutting into her knees and the vinegar bottle by her side. She wonders how deep is deep enough and she decides that the answer is as deep as she can go. Every day in the camp she accomplishes more than she starts out thinking she can. The Nazis have taught her that; they’ve proven to her by her own example that she has more capacity for labor than she would have ever thought possible in a perfect world or at least an ordinary one. So she digs. And when the sole of her shoe cracks she puts it back on and removes the other one and digs some more. In the morning she’ll regret breaking it—she’ll regret it for days and weeks to come if she has days and weeks left to her—but she digs. And when she can dig no more, when the other shoe is cracked and useless too and she dares to be absent from the block for not one more minute and she thinks she might be hearing the sound of the roll call starting up, she lays the bottle into its grave like a baby, and covers it up with mud. Her testament, commended to the earth.

*

Saturday dawns bright. Eidel awakens to it with a strange good feeling welling up in her heart. She can’t quite identify it, but soon the haze of sleep clears and it comes to her. Today is the day she’ll see her daughter’s picture again. Not only that, but it’s the day she’ll take up painting for the first time in perhaps a year. She wonders if she can still do it. If she can still do either one of these two things, bearing witness to her child on one hand and painting on the other. Each will take reserves that she hasn’t lately called upon.

In the kitchen she refuses to join in the drawing of lots, believing that someone else ought to have the benefit of starting the fire because she’ll be spending a few hours in the deputy’s warm apartment. Why not share the wealth? Perhaps, she thinks, there isn’t a fixed amount of good and bad in the camp after all. Perhaps by distributing her own good fortune among her sisters in the kitchen she’s set in motion something positive that will go on forever. She thinks it but she doesn’t dare believe it. There’s a difference.

Just before she sets out for the village she grazes the heel of her hand on the red-hot stovetop, and to cool it she holds it under a stream of icy water from the tap. She’s on edge, no doubt about that, and her nerves have made her careless. As she watches the water run she remembers her childhood in Warsaw, how her mother—her mother now hiding somewhere in Sweden, God bless her—had believed that butter would soothe a burn. Although Eidel herself had never seen any value in it she’d gone on to practice the same folk medicine on her own children anyhow, because where was the harm. It was just butter after all, bright yellow butter as plentiful as air. Here in the camp it’s as precious as gold bullion and twice as rare, so water will have to suffice. At least there’s plenty of it. And it’s icy as death.

When she arrives at the apartment, the supplies that Vollmer has sent for are stacked up in the entryway, carton upon carton. The housekeeper brings a bread knife, and Eidel methodically unwraps each package, going slowly, moving as if under a spell. The things that she unwraps have extraordinary qualities both mystical and physical, and the merest touch of them takes her back to a world she’s forgotten. Everything is of the highest quality, as fine as any goods she’s ever laid her hands on, each bottle and tube and brush sent all the way from Berlin wrapped in a soft drawstring bag or a set of nested boxes, all of it cushioned with bale after bale of tissue paper. Vollmer has spent a fortune. Enough to feed the women of Eidel’s bunk three excellent daily meals for a month or more, enough to last years at their present rate.

The housekeeper begins tidying the wreckage as Eidel picks out what she’ll need for today’s work, a sketch pad and a packet of soft graphite pencils and a gum eraser. She finds the sharpener and puts points on three of the pencils and sets the sharpener back down on a narrow table along the wall, between a vase and a small lacquered box. The housekeeper looks daggers at her and points to the sharpener and says that perhaps she should have asked Herr Vollmer for a supply chest rather than making a ruin of the furniture, and she sweeps it off onto the floor where it smashes to bits. More to clean up, she says with a curse.

The sound of breakage draws the boy, little Karl in his embroidered bundhosen and his starched white shirt, careening through the kitchen door and stumbling upon the various wrappings and boxes as if he’s missed his own birthday. “Hey!” he says, the trussed-up little creature, red jam smeared across his chin. “What’s all this?”

His mother comes for him before either of the women needs to answer. He’s tearing through the castoff boxes and bags and wrapping papers like some burrowing animal seeking cover, and she opens the door again and stands watching for a moment, amused. The girl, Luzi, pokes her head out from behind, arms around her mother’s knee, and peers into the tempest with round eyes. At last the woman speaks. “Now, Karl,” she says, just as he turns his attention from the empty wrappings to the carefully arranged jars and bottles and brushes, “I’m sure there’ll be time for you to play with those later on.” Sending him a sweet smile and letting some of it spill over in the direction of the other women.

“If you please, Madam,” says Eidel, “it might be best to get him his own.”

The woman of the house raises a single elegantly-penciled eyebrow and holds it there like the blade of a guillotine.

Eidel goes on. “Water colors,” she says. “They’ll be easier for him to work with.”

Slowly, slowly, the woman lowers her eyebrow.

Heedless of anything, smirking up at the prisoner who would deprive him of his due, the boy chooses one tube of paint and jams it into the pocket of his snowy white shirt. The paint is a Chinese red, almost the red of the German flag, and although Eidel hadn’t requested this color in particular the supplier in Berlin must have felt it necessary. They’re all critics, after all. Everyone in the world. She doesn’t mind seeing it go, but because she’d still like to record a decisive victory over the boy she says to his mother, “These oils, you know—they never come out of anything.” And then, rather than wait for the result, she pretends to study the fresh points of her pencils.

*

The portrait of Lydia is missing, of course, when they go into the dining room. The wall above the fireplace is bare except for the empty nail and a tiny crack that runs down from it, ramifying like a vein until it disappears at last. The fire is dead in the grate on this sunny day and the wind whistles ghostly somewhere above the top of the chimney and no one in the deputy’s family seems to think that Eidel should feel anything at all regarding what they’ve done. They don’t even look her way. Instead the boy pulls the girl’s pigtails and their mother separates them bodily and their father enters through the rear door on a hot gust of bad temper. Only Luzi, situated at length on her father’s lap, finally notices Eidel’s frozen stance before the empty spot. She points to her with a chubby finger and says, “Father said we have plenty of Jews around. That’s why he got rid of it.” And when Eidel doesn’t respond—when Eidel doesn’t even move unless you count the shuddering of her breath and the tightening of her grip on the fistful of pencils—she takes a kind of childish pity on her and adds, “It was a good painting. We just have too many Jews.”

At length she composes herself. She takes a seat on the wobbly chair and props the sketchbook in her lap and directs the family into the most pleasing composition possible. Her instinct would be to catch them as they are, that was always her method and it comes back to her now, but the business of portraiture for hire is something different. She has the boy stand behind his seated mother with a hand placed gently on her shoulder, a nice compositional curve starting at Vollmer’s face and dipping down to his wife’s and then up again just a touch to Karl’s. But the woman doesn’t want Karl hidden back there with his expensive new trousers, so she insists that she and her husband separate and place the boy in the middle. Eidel copes, adjusting her vision and trying again, leaning forward in that hard chair with her back to the groaning fireplace. Doing her best to deny the absence behind her.

Max

Remember this:
Sentiment is the enemy of the work.

That was old Uncle Andy’s mistake from the outset.

Fine, all right, maybe not from the outset—I’ve never claimed to be any kind of an expert on the complete Wyeth
oeuvre;
it could be that he was more interested in formal matters in the early days, before he got started stamping out those windy fields and farmhouses like so many Christmas cookies; it could be that he took a wrong turn somewhere, started letting himself be distracted by the money or the adulation or whatever, surrendered to certain cheapening influences—but in the end, no question about it, his downfall was an excess of sentiment.

To be perfectly clear, I suppose I ought to say
sentimentality.
It’s difficult to communicate these things properly. If you could get them right by just talking about them, you wouldn’t waste your time painting.

People are forever telling one another how this or that work of art
makes them feel,
as if that were the point of it. As if the artist had set out with no higher goal than to affect them personally, to
touch
them, as they say, for Christ’s sake. The painter as
masseur.
It gives me the willies.

It’s no business of mine how you might feel about something. It’s no business of mine whether or not you feel anything at all. The minute a person starts worrying about that, he’s doomed. He’s no better than Andrew Wyeth, backed into a corner by his own hunger for approval, rendering up that same old reliable pathos again and again. Revved-up old sterile Uncle Andy with just one uncompromised and unmediated urge left to him at the end of his life, one pure God-granted spark, up there worshipping his naked Helga in Frolic Weymouth’s back bedroom, dying to let the world in on his faithless little secret because he just can’t help himself anymore. He’s got to make it all public. He’s got to make them feel what he’s been feeling. Give them that little massage that they’ve come to count on.

And not just his audience, but himself too.

That’s the difference, you see. It’s mutual, this
feeling
business. It goes in both directions, and it breaks down the integrity of the work by breaking down the integrity of the workman. By weakening him and making him needy.

Think of my mother. She could have been one of the greats, had she lived long enough. Had times been different. You’ll have to take my word for that, as I believe I may have said, but it’s true. My word should be sufficient. I think I’ve earned that. She could have been one of the greats, and even though her work was utterly and completely informed by a love for certain things and certain people—not to mention a love for beauty as if beauty were a thing itself, and a love for certain paintings and ways of painting and even ways of seeing that had gone before—although her work always sprang from love, as I was saying, it never, ever insisted that you must love it in return, or love her subjects in return, or love the artist herself in return, God forbid.

Never that. Not
Mama.