Diary of the Fall (11 page)

Would it make any difference if I were to explain how each and every one of my grandfather’s relatives
died? Would anyone be particularly moved if his brother, another brother, a third brother, his father and mother, his girlfriend and at least one cousin and one aunt, and who knows how many friends and neighbors and work colleagues and people he was quite close to, if each and every one of them had suffered a more or less natural death in Auschwitz, in the hospital or in the work camps, or if they had been sent to the gas chamber, been given a hanger for their clothes and, while they waited for what they thought would be a hot shower, listened to the music that the guards ordered to be played, and meanwhile the pellets of hydrogen cyanide were exposed to the air to release a gas, and that gas was breathed in, it entered the bloodstream, and some people were in such agony they hurled themselves against the walls in despair, and this lasted until all of them finally fell and were dragged outside and placed on an operating table where the bodies were sliced open, the fat cut out, the teeth extracted, the eyes removed, and each and every organ placed in separate receptacles, liver, kidney, pancreas, stomach, lungs, heart, so that all that remained was the carcass and the bones, and the carcass and the bones were thrown into pits, a million and a half holes dug and filled
with skeletons that had once been nameless adults weighing thirty kilos?

Or if my grandfather’s brother, another brother and a third brother and his father and mother, and his girlfriend, and at least one cousin and one aunt, and who knows how many friends and neighbors and work colleagues and people he was quite close to, if each of them had been used for the scientific experiments they say were carried out in Auschwitz, deliberate exposure to chlorine gas or mustard gas, deliberate infection with hepatitis and malaria, induced hypothermia in a tank of freezing water with a probe stuck up their rectum, a doctor who injected ink to see if the patient’s eyes would change color, a doctor who sewed two twins together, a doctor who sewed up a woman’s belly with a cat inside, a group of twenty-three doctors who repeatedly raped a woman whose eyes had been injected with coloring and whose bloodstream had been infected with malaria and hepatitis and tetanus, a woman who weighed only thirty kilos, who had previously been immersed in a tank of water and sulfuric acid at freezing temperatures with a probe stuck up her rectum and a live cat sewn inside her belly, her
teeth extracted so that she couldn’t bite the doctors, her fat removed to be turned into soap, her organs stored for future use, liver, kidney, pancreas, stomach, lungs, heart, appendix, trachea, muscles, tendons, ganglia, nails, hair, skin, gums, her bones thrown into a pit with another million and a half skeletons who were once adults who had been repeatedly raped and dissected and given electric shocks and doused in kerosene ready to be thrown on the fire beneath the Auschwitz sky?

Would it make any difference if the things I’m describing are still true more than half a century after Auschwitz, when no one can bear to hear about it anymore, when even to me it seems old-fashioned to write about it, or are those things of importance to me only because of the implications they had for the lives of all those around me?

I’m forty now and, two years ago, I got drunk and slept on a park bench on the day I found out about my father’s Alzheimer’s. I didn’t want my third wife to see me in that state and ask questions because then

the only way of escaping another quarrel and possibly the final act of my third marriage would be to tell her about my visit to the doctor that afternoon, and give her the results of my father’s tests, and allow her to see my reaction when I spoke about the diagnosis, and perhaps tell her everything I knew about my father and everything I knew about my grandfather and, consequently, everything I knew about me.

My grandfather died on a Sunday, at around seven o’clock in the morning, when all the doctors are at home and the hospital emergency services are in the hands of interns or duty doctors on the red-eye shift. On a Sunday it’s harder to deal with the practical side of any death: the bureaucracy involved in getting the body released, telling all your friends, contacting the cemetery, getting a death notice printed in the newspaper.

I don’t know if my father went to the funeral. I don’t know how long it took him to make the connection between my grandfather’s death and Auschwitz, if
he did so on that very day, at that very moment, or if this only became clear when he read my grandfather’s notebooks, and there would inevitably have been a delay between their discovery and the delivery of the translation that my father commissioned without telling my grandmother. I don’t know who did the translation, I don’t know how my father paid them, I don’t know if he asked the translator to keep quiet about it, if he made it clear to the translator that he or she should make no comment on what the notebooks contained, because up until then my father had no idea what my grandfather had written in those sixteen volumes without ever once mentioning the relatives he saw die, and it’s possible that he may have seen each and every one of them die, the last breath, the wide, lifeless eyes of his brother, another brother, a third brother, of his father and mother, of his girlfriend and his cousin and his aunt and who knows how many friends and neighbors and work colleagues and people he was quite close to, my father making it clear to the translator that he didn’t want him to make any comment on any such scenes because none could justify the scene of my grandfather lying dead at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning.

When you’re fourteen, it’s highly unlikely that you would wake up at seven in the morning with the house still in silence and instantly slip out of bed and go to the bathroom and then to the kitchen to get something from the fridge, that would only make sense if you’d been woken by a dream or a presentiment or a noise, and whenever my father talked about Auschwitz I think he was remembering precisely that day, my father opening his eyes (Auschwitz) and jumping out of bed (Auschwitz) and opening the door of his room (Auschwitz) and hesitating when he remembered the study where my grandfather had spent that night and every night since he had finally given up his battle with those memories.

When I was fourteen I drank whisky alone in my room because I had come face-to-face with those memories too. They were in the drawings of Hitler, in the notes I wrote about João’s mother, in the certainty that because of them I could never again be João’s friend and would change schools and meet other people and get on with my life never knowing what became of João, if he was alive (Auschwitz), if he was
still living in Porto Alegre (Auschwitz), if he had children (Auschwitz), if he became a doctor or a lawyer or a bus conductor (Auschwitz), if even once during those more than twenty years he realized that making a drawing of Auschwitz was the same as making a drawing of his mother’s illness, because Auschwitz was for my grandfather what that illness was for his mother, and my grandfather’s story and his mother’s story were the same.

A story that ends and begins with my father emerging, frightened, from his room next to my grandmother’s, and I don’t know if my grandmother was sleeping or if she had woken up as well, my grandmother alone in her bed, and now they both know they have to go forward, step by step along the corridor, the silence of the house and the world on a Sunday morning on which the only thing that had happened was that bang, a sound my father never stopped hearing, it was there between the lines of all our conversations about my grandfather, every time my father uttered that word, that short, sharp bang was there in every syllable of that word,
Auschwitz
, my father walking over to the study door, which was locked, because
my grandfather made sure of that, making it difficult for someone to open the door because that way he would gain a minute or five or ten or half an hour until they found a way of forcing the lock or kicking in the wooden panels, and with each kick my father somehow knew what he would find on the other side, because he had knocked on the door and called my grandfather and shouted several times and my grandfather couldn’t possibly be sleeping or simply waiting for the door to be broken down, and the short, sharp bang (Auschwitz) that came from the study (Auschwitz) which my father finally managed to enter (Auschwitz) with the help of a crowbar (Auschwitz) would inevitably be what my father had imagined it would be (Auschwitz), a fact he confirmed when he saw, through the crack in the door, my grandfather’s white hair and his head, arms, trunk and whole body slumped across the desk.

You just have to go on the Internet to read that the fifty-two ovens in Auschwitz wouldn’t have been large enough to burn four thousand seven hundred and fifty-six bodies a day, the average needed to achieve the total number of deaths in the official statistics.

There are endless texts stating that the gas chambers could not possibly have worked, because the gas released by the particles of hydrogen cyanide would have dispersed and because of the difficulty of fitting that number of people into one of those compartments without arousing their suspicions. The gas would kill the guards when they went into the chamber after the executions. Even if they had installed some miraculous ventilation system that could eliminate any risk of contact with the respiratory system, even if the guards wore masks, which weren’t 100 percent effective at the time anyway, you would still have to extract every single particle and pump it out into the air, where, of course, it would have killed
anyone who happened to be standing downwind — guards, officials, officers.

Just one click and you’ll find someone telling you that there are no photos or architectural plans of the gas chambers. That there was no reason to kill the prisoners, who were working for the Germans. That there was no reason to reduce the capacity of the camps, which produced coal, synthetic rubber, chemical components, weapons and fuel, and thus boosted the country’s economy, benefiting companies such as BMW, Daimler-Benz, the Deutsche Bank, Siemens and Volkswagen.

I’ve read that not only Jews died of starvation, but a large portion of the German population. That the problem isn’t the number of deaths, but whether those deaths were brought about deliberately, and not a single document has been found containing explicit orders to carry out the final solution, nor a single piece of testimony from a Nazi source made with a lawyer present and under oath, something that is highly unlikely if, as is alleged, it was a decision made at the top and passed down to generals, colonels, majors, lieutenants, sergeants, corporals and privates, as well as to all the civil servants and police involved in the machinery of extermination.

I’ve read and heard a lot of things along those lines, as well as each and every one of the counterarguments, and I could talk for hours on the subject because there are people who have devoted their whole lives to formulating these questions and answers, but what matters here isn’t whether or not the number of deaths was exaggerated. Or if the deaths did or didn’t happen exactly as described in the official version. Or if what some people term an industry has since grown up based on that version. Or if what those people call an industry is used now to justify any kind of active oppression which, with a little rhetorical and moral flexibility, can then be compared to the oppression suffered during the Second World War.

What matters here, regardless of the gravity of the subject — because if Auschwitz had killed only one person on the grounds of ethnicity or religious belief, the mere existence of such a place would be just as appalling — what matters is that any lie or imprecision, however small or large, would make no difference to my father, because for him Auschwitz was never a place, a historical fact or an ethnic debate, but a concept in which one believes or ceases to believe simply because one chooses to.

My father doesn’t have the same name as my grandfather. I don’t have the same name as my father. There are a whole series of other things I didn’t inherit from him either: hair, nose, handwriting. I also don’t do complicated mental arithmetic or enjoy listening to the radio in the morning, the same program every day, a battery radio with the volume turned down low and a presenter who talks about the violence and the traffic and the thieves currently in parliament while my father eats bread and a slice of cheese and makes a chewing noise that has annoyed my mother for more than forty years, and for a good part of the morning she complains because he hasn’t cleared the table and didn’t pick up the phone and hasn’t answered a single question she’s asked him in those same more than forty years, and by about ten or eleven they’re talking normally again and planning a journey to some country where he can spend at least one afternoon safely ensconced in shops that sell electronic
equipment while she buys clothes and presents and he complains because you could fill a whole cargo terminal with all those packages for people no one has ever even heard of.

From my father I inherited the color of his eyes (brown and slightly yellow on very bright days), the reading habit (fiction in my case, nonfiction in his), a few favorite foods (barbecued meat, melted cheese, rice mixed with gravy and egg yolk). I’m stubborn like him too. Learning that he had Alzheimer’s was the only moment in my forty years when I really thought about stubbornness, if you can call it that, and if you can credit it with the fact that I’ve reached the age of forty having told my father most of my stories, every decision I made about what seemed important at the time, renting an apartment, choosing a profession, changing careers and cities, the beginning and end of two marriages, the books I’ve written and the things I’ve most enjoyed and whatever else I can fit into a weekly phone call to Porto Alegre summarizing what I believe he needs to know, at least in the sense of distracting him and distracting myself so that neither of us will need to say anything about the fact that from then on that’s pretty much how it will be, a half-hour chat each week and a couple of visits a year, when
we’ll spend a brief, pleasant day pretending that time hasn’t passed, and that it will always be possible for me to continue hiding from him my most important secret, which in some way has always defined who I am, and in some way too can only be explained by a concept — a truth or a lie or both things, depending on how you react to a scene like that of my grandfather slumped over his desk.