Numbers
So, despite being on this ugly train where we are unfed, stripped of privacy, and have no chance to bathe, where we are denied not only every kind of pleasures but every kind of basic conveniences, I’m saving my spirits by trying to write, to finally find an artful detail that will make sense, will reveal something of an overall design, will turn this design into an elegant story.
VI.
I have been unusually silent these last two days. I still keep guarding a couple of notebooks and a whole box of sharpened pencils that I was able to take with me… However, I only write down my thoughts, which is not art… My own thoughts would only be interesting for my biographers when I become famous… Or for a researcher studying the racial laws and the War… But the literary world needs something beautiful and miraculous, perhaps a novel or a couple of them, something for which I know I was born and kept alive–fate always protected me. But I seem incapable of producing anything nowadays…
It’s as though together with my possessions and family flat (perhaps now occupied by the greedy butcher with his meat bricks and daughters looking like meat bricks, too, square and red), they took from me the ability to describe things…
But should I describe things I see in front of myself… What kind of literature would it be if I describe today’s fight for a piece of paper that another woman on the train wanted to take from me to cover her excrements? I can’t even say this–so unpoetic and totally ridiculous this is… But yes, this is what happened today. Once the train stopped in the middle of the field among some grass and weeds, and we were allowed to jump down and to do whatever we needed to do, people decided that there would be more such stops, each with more and more conveniences… Everybody on the train was thinking that we were going somewhere to the East to work and to be useful, so we were expecting not this grass or weeds but rooms with a floor, a door, or a window with a curtain…. That’s why when the train stopped and some men went to the left and some women to the opposite direction to take care of their bodily needs, some people said, “Well, we’ll wait till we come where they are taking us; here it’s not the best place.”
This woman, she was always staring at me when I was trying to write… She was giving me a dirty look, not understanding that the time of dirty looks had passed together with the peace and quiet… Now nobody cares about her demanding and angry glances… She was older than me, in a dark coat, with a dark scarf on her head blending her into the dark innards of the train…And she was staring at me as though it was no time for writing now… And then she said, “Why won’t you give me a couple of pages from your sketchbook?” And I asked her, “But I need them myself, why are you interested?” And she said that she had to have them to cover some dirt… She didn’t mind explaining it to me in her dialect… When I said “No,” she got very mad. She said that she needed it for “a real thing,” not “philosophical thoughts.”
She said to me literally the following:
– Who do you think you are? Do you think you can work for Germans better than me simply because you have good handwriting? Don’t hope! They’ll kill you together with me. And I’m not as educated as you are. I earned my living with my hands…
And she showed me her calloused hands; they were not as ugly as one might think at first… Actually, she had long beautiful fingers…
Despite her nice hands, her mouth was ugly. She kept repeating:
– You all will die here! You all will die!
And people were turning their eyes away from her, and one man shouted at her, “Shut up or we’ll strangle you, so you’ll die because of us Italians and not because of the Germans if you don’t keep silent.”
And only after the shouts did she stop saying nonsense. But she kept whispering in my direction:
– Don’t think that your pen will be useful to you in the hell where we’re all going!
I’m not sure whether I was annoyed or not by this; rather, I wanted to protect my pencils and paper and, also, to watch this woman very carefully to see whether she could become a character in my story. But, again, besides her calloused, aristocratic hands, I didn’t find any detail worthy of literature, and I kept silent.