See Under David Grossman (free ebook reader TXT) 📖

his position, admitting (“I won’t deny it”) that the “movement” ideology is harsh and extreme at times, but this, after all, is its only chance to succeed, “unlike other movements and revolutions and ideas that are doomed because they compromise at every step with human weakness!” though he is willing to acknowledge that “there have been cases of nervous collapse among us. It’s no secret. I myself was acquainted with an excellent officer who committed suicide because he began to have nightmares about murdering his wife and daughters, of all things. But every war has its deserters and cowards and traitors!” And at this point I am forced to put into his mouth a piece of factual testimony from Himmler’s1943 address in Poznan: “When one hundred or five hundred or a thousand corpses are lying side by side, to continue to be decent human beings anyhow, this—with a few exceptions, the result of human weakness—is what makes us strong.”

“And we are all fighting this war, Wasserman,” says Neigel in a strained, almost husky voice. “Things are not as simple as they may seem to you inside the camp. Because when we kill mothers and children, we have to be strong, as the Reichsführer said. In our souls, that is. We have to be strong. To make decisions. And no one else can know about it. It’s a silent war, fought by each of us. Yes, there are some types, of course, like Staukeh, for instance, who get a sort of sick pleasure out of it. There’s that type, too. But a real SS officer isn’t supposed to enjoy his work. Did you know that sometimes Himmler himself comes out to watch us when we make the selections, to see whether our feelings show? You didn’t know? Well, he does. It’s a secret war, I tell you. The winner is one who can walk the line … who can understand that the party demands sacrifice. Because we are on the front line here, between two kinds of humanity … and we are exposed to certain dangers, and in order to be a good officer, sometimes, as I said, you have to make decisions, like sending a part of this … of this machine out on leave,” and he places two stiff fingers next to his heart. “Suspend it till the war is over … and then you put it back and enjoy the new Reich … and I want to tell you something no one else knows, it’s all right to tell you, because with you it’s different.”

And Wasserman stares at him, and understands immediately, as I do, what has been happening here in this “White Room,” under the reign of absolute physio-literary laws. Because both of us, Wasserman and myself, have waived the writer’s foremost obligation, that of delineating his characters, and because we prefer to dismiss or delay our involvement with Neigel for the time being, he has cleverly and subtly taken advantage of our distaste for him in order to expand the terrain of his personality, the Lebensraum of his limited, posterlike existence within us, and to annex more and more character traits, levels of depth, biographical details, and logical considerations, in a word, vitality, which is what now enables him to tell Wasserman that “in the past few months, due to a certain incident of a private nature,” he has been fighting that secret war here, and winning it anew each day, and again he says what Wasserman has also been saying in his own way: “These things are not as simple as they seem.”

Wasserman sighs and rubs his tired eyes, and answers in a weak, weary voice. Replaceable parts, he says, which can be taken out and put back later, exist only in machines, whereas “the self, Herr Neigel, the soul, the brain and heart, ai, these do not fall into the category of machinery, unless you take a part out and turn it into a machine with your own hands. In that case, it would be very difficult indeed to repair the damage, because to do so you would need a soul, or someone who has a soul to love you.” Only, between machines, he continues, love cannot exist. And he who turns himself into a machine will quickly discern that everyone around him is made the same way, and those who are made differently he will not even be able to see, or else he will want to be rid of them. “One can, Herr Neigel, be exceedingly cynical and say that we are all machines, automatons, digesting and reproducing and thinking and speaking, so that even our love for the wife of our bosom, our noble and eternal love, could mayhap, begging your pardon, fit another foot just as well, if, heaven forbid, a disaster befell our darling. And if instead of our child, whom we sometimes love till it chokes our throats, another child had been born to us, we would have loved it just as dearly. In short, the vessels we are equipped with in life, our pots and pans and paraphernalia, are by and large the same, only the world infuses them with its sundry fare, and as such—we are machines and automatons, only there is a trace of something else within us, I know not what to call it, and that is effort. Indeed, the effort we make on behalf of this particular woman, or this particular child, the evanescent spark that flashes between two evanescent creatures like us and no other two, ai, that same exuberance which brings us into each other’s sphere I will call ‘choice.’ And inasmuch as choice is given to us so rarely, we must never relinquish it … that is what I wished to say, but everything is becoming so complicated and twisted, nu, well … I am not accustomed to making speeches either … forgive this mawkishness …” And he stops, ablush. They would have gone on arguing for hours, those two.